It’s a Girl Thing!

Periods suck! Particularly if you are like me and my friend Karen who have a tendency to have monster flows—the kind that can’t be absorbed by any measly super-sized tampon or pad.

Sorry guys. You can skip this post if you like. Naturally, girls talk about these things and recently my friend told me about an endometrial ablation treatment she was considering, marketed under the trade name NovaSure. Endometrial ablation is the medical term for a procedure intended to destroy, through minimally invasive means, the lining of the uterus, or edometrium. In the case of NovaSure, this is achieved in less than five minutes by use of wand inserted in the vagina which delivers doses of electromagnetic energy. The resulting scaring of tissue means lighter periods or no periods at all for many of the women who undergo this procedure. Karen didn’t know what to expect but she hoped this treatment would at least remedy the ridiculous flows that had left her anemic and listless.

Karen gave me a report about two months after the procedure. She reported that her recovery had been complicated by an infection, and the fact that the procedure was scheduled just before her period was due meant she had to have a D & C to clear out as much of the blood as possible before her doctor went in. Karen experienced a six week recovery phase during which her body was still expelling blood and tissue but after that she noticed a marked improvement—a much lighter flow and a shorter duration of her period. She was very pleased she had undergone this procedure. Still, I had some more questions for her:

What other options did you have besides the NovaSure procedure to alleviate your heavy bleeding?
My other option was to get on the pill, or to have an IUD that releases progesterone into my system. Either way, the options were going to alter hormones. Given that I’m a happily medicine-free person, I didn’t want to go on any pills and the idea of having a foreign body in me made me really squeamish. I would rather be rid of the problem area, than put something else in it. I’ve already had my tonsils and my appendix removed— what’s one more unused body part?

Was your doctor proposing a full or partial hysterectomy as an option?
Neither of these was proposed, partially because of my age, and the fact that they tend to upset women hormonally. And nothing in my condition was that dire.

How did your doctor qualify you for this procedure?
I found my doctor on the NovaSure site. She was listed as a preferred physician who has done a lot of these. So she knew what to ask. She took a complete history, with good detail about what my most recent monthly periods have been like. She did a Pap smear, blood work and a urine analysis, to make sure that thyroid, diseases or other items weren’t causing the problems. They also did an internal ultrasound to verify that it wasn’t cysts or things like that. She was very thorough. As far as qualifying for it, and having it covered by insurance, the message was, if it’s making you miserable and your quality of life is suffering because of it, it’s a good enough reason to do it.

Did she try to make sure you did not plan on having children?
She did ask me this, to be sure, because the procedure does significantly, if not remove, the chances of becoming pregnant. Give my age, 39, and my desire not to have children, we eliminated this as an obstacle.

Does this procedure interfere with egg production?
It does not. I still drop an egg. But because the lining is gone from the uterus and can no longer hold blood, there’s nothing for the egg to attach to.

Does it affect hormones?
No. Because I still cycle, drop the egg, have my ovaries, etc. I liken it to a telephone system. If an office building has 15 phones, and you unplug one, the other phones still get calls going in and out. The phone jack is still in the wall, but there’s no phone to ring anymore. My uterus just doesn’t get the call to store up blood anymore, and there’s no lining there to hold it.

Does it affect mood?
Yes, for me it has to do with lack of stress and discomfort. I’m no longer fatigued, bloated, nervous about accidents, or scared to wear white pants. And so it’s one (gigantic) less thing to worry about. It’s made me feel sexier, more desirable, and more confident – that plays well in the bedroom. And now, I don’t have to take 5-10 days off from the gym, so my energy level is up, and my weight is down.

Two important things to note. This procedure is not recommended for those women who plan to get pregnant after the procedure as pregnancy poses risks for both mother and child, and it is possible to become pregnant after this procedure which is why doctors recommend birth control for those women who are still in their childbearing years.

I’m not a medical expert by any stretch but I was very pleased to learn we girls had another tool in our arsenal to combat the Monster Period. If you want to find out more go to the FAQ section of the NovaSure website or ask your OB/GYN about NovaSure.

Do U.S. labor markets favor single and childless women?

A recent article in the New York Times made this observation:

The last three men nominated to the Supreme Court have all been married and, among them, have seven children. The last three women — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Harriet Miers (who withdrew) — have all been single and without children.

The author of this piece, David Leonhardt, notes that even though we now have many more women in the workplace, and we are moving toward better female representation in our Supreme Court, women who take time off the career path to raise children or switch to part-time hours still fall short of their male peers in earnings in the U.S. labor marketplace. He cites a study titled “Dynamics of the Gender Gap for Young Professionals in the Financial and Corporate Sectors”:

A recent study of business school graduates from the University of Chicago found that in the early years after graduating, men and women had “nearly identical labor incomes and weekly hours worked.” Men and women also paid a similar career price for taking off or working part time. Women, however, were vastly more likely to do so.
As a result, 15 years after graduation, the men were making about 75 percent more than the women. The study — done by Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz — did find one subgroup of women whose careers resembled those of men: women who had no children and never took time off.

As a freelance writer, I have been outside of the corporate world for some time now but had I pursued that corporate career track I might have been one of those women. Are you childless and on an uninterrupted career path? If so, do feel like you have the same labor incomes as your male peers who work a similar number of hours?

Flickr Photo by mirimcfly

Two is Enough is Designed for Singles Too

Don’t let the title Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice fool you. I have designed the content of this book for singles too.

I recently received an email from a single woman who works in the social services field. She wrote: "I wanted to thank you for writing Two is Enough...Although I am single, the research was relevant to me as well. I'm glad your book corrected the myths that childless couples are selfish or do not love children. I do not want children for medical and environmental reasons, but I enjoy working with children. It is important to our society that women have more information like the research you provided."

I pleased to receive this email. I interviewed a number of single women and men in the course of my research for Two Is Enough. I found that the primary motives and rationales for remaining childfree are the same for singles and for couples. In Two is Enough I address the fact that singles have the additional challenge of finding suitable partners in a dating pool filled with candidates who imagine a life with kids even though they haven’t really given it much thought. How does that turn out? Read the profiles in Chapter Five of Two is Enough to find out.

Childfree Women: Could it be the Hormones? Asks Madison Mag

I granted an interview to Madison Magazine in Australia last year and they published a very good article in March posing the question: Why does society vilify women who choose not to have children?

There were many great quotes from women who had been harangued and criticized because of their choice to remain childfree and some interesting opinions from a sexologist who had made the suggestion that lack of desire for children might be inherited and have something to do with hormone levels.

This is what the sexologist Dr. Frances Quirk suggested may be happening, as summarized by Alexandra Carlton, the author of this article:

We’re equipped with a physiological arsenal of drives, urges, hormones and synapses that will us, continuously, to make babies. But just like someone can be born without perfect hearing or eyesight, or be good or poor at athletics or maths or drawing, some people are born with lower levels of certain hormones. In women, it’s thought low oestrogen levels or high testosterone levels could result in a diminished to entirely eradicated desire to have babies.

Of course, it’s not all about hormones. Dr Quirk suggests that for nature to influence our behavior, there needs to be a fair amount of nurture at work, too. A person’s upbringing, experiences or current situation will generally play a part in controlling their desire to have, or not have, children. Two of the women Madison spoke to for this story – Annabel and 31-year-old children’s model agent Nicola Allan – admitted that their own mothers had confessed that kids hadn’t exactly been in their grand plans. “My mum always said, ‘If I had my time again, I don’t think I’d have kids,’” relates Allan, who says she personally adores being around children – something she does every day through her work – but has no urge to have any of her own. “I don’t take what she said as an insult. She loves us to death and she’s a great mum. But I can see where she’s coming from. I’ve known from the age of 14 that I didn’t want kids either.”

Dr Quirk says Allan’s attitude may be an indicator that she’s inherited a low oestrogen level from her mother; as a result, each of them could harbour a low or non-existent desire to bear children. Or, “the daughter may be having a psychological reaction against being told that her mother didn’t want her” and doesn’t want to put another child through that feeling of rejection.

But most people who identify as childless by choice will refute the notion that there’s some subconscious, must-get-to-the-bottom-of-this, someone-call-Dr-Phil abnormality behind their decision not to reproduce. “People always think there’s some deep-seated reason for why I don’t want children,” says Jenifur Wale, a 34-year-old model and art teacher from Melbourne. “But it’s really not that complicated. I have a wonderful family. I love kids, especially my nieces. I have had meaningful relationships with men. It’s just that having a child has never been for me. I feel really fulfilled; I don’t need a sense of purpose and I’m not looking for something to fill my time. And I feel loved, so I don’t need a child to give that to me.”

So is it nature, nurture, hormones? What do you think?

The Truth About Parenting

Chris, one of my Facebook friends posted a link on the Two is Enough wall to a New York Magazine article titled All Joy and No Fun. It’s an extremely well-written overview of recent studies showing how and why the fun has gone out of parenthood. Studies reveal that parenthood is getting harder with each successive generation. Even with their tight schedules parents actually spend more time with their kids then their parent’s spent with them, on average, but they get less out of it.

But outside of academia people just don’t want to believe these findings:

The idea that parents are less happy than nonparents has become so commonplace in academia that it was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true. “Contrary to much of the literature,” said the introduction, “our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children.” Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum. “After correcting the problem,”it read,“the main results of the paper no longer hold. The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.”

Yet one can see why people were rooting for that paper. The results of almost all the others violate a parent’s deepest intuition. Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist and host of This Emotional Life on PBS, wrote fewer than three pages about compromised parental well-being in Stumbling on Happiness. But whenever he goes on the lecture circuit, skeptical questions about those pages come up more frequently than anything else. “I’ve never met anyone who didn’t argue with me about this,” he says. “Even people who believe the data say they feel sorry for those for whom it’s true.”

Why is this important to the childless by choice? Well, the next time someone says, “You’ll regret not having kid.” or, “Parenthood is such a joy, you’re missing out” you can send them a link to this article.

Flickr photo by The Enabler

Prop 8 Trial Exposes Flaws in Marriage Equals Children Argument

In my google search to catch up on the latest news on the Prop 8 case I came across Nan Hunter’s blog titled Hunter of Justice. Nan is a professor at Georgetown Law in DC and has also been following the progress of the Prop 8 same-sex marriage case in California. In her blog post, Hunter points out that the argument that children are integral to a marriage made by David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute for American Values, at the Prop 8 trial, comes at the same time that U.S. trends show a weakening of the cultural assumption that marriage equals children.

Hunter offers an excerpt of a NY Times commentary written by Tara Parker-Pope who pointed out that while Blankenhorn makes the argument in federal court that: “Extending marital rights to couples who cannot conceive children would change marriage from 'a child-based public institution to an adult-centered private institution' and 'weaken the role of marriage generally in society’” US couples are spending less of their married years, or none at all in our case, raising children, according to a Rutgers’s report called “Life Without Children: The Social Retreat From Children and How It’s Changing America.”

And as revealed in a 2007 Pew Research Center survey, “only 41 percent of respondents said children were important to a happy marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990.”

So what is happening? Increasingly, more people are choosing to remain childless in early adulthood and/or choosing to have less children, resulting in many more years of “childfreedom.” No longer is the bulk of our adult experience consumed with raising children. So for Blankenship to suggest that we will weaken the institution of marriage if we allow same-sex couples who can’t conceive children to marry, he is essentially ignoring the millions of couples, gay and straight, who are proving him wrong and finding strength, stability, and happiness in their childless marriages or are choosing to use surrogates or donor sperm, or be adoptive parents.

In my opinion, Blankenhorn’s argument is a weak one, unsupported by evidence, and I hope and believe that Ted Olson and his team will prevail and prove that a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

What do you think?

Flickr photo by Jamison Wieser

Carrie and Mr. Big are Childfree

I just saw the new Sex and the City 2 movie and was thrilled that characters Carrie and Mr. Big came out as childfree.

Political analyst and commentator Taylor Marsh noticed too and in her Huffington Post review of this film she gave kudos to SACT 2 writers for tackling issues of female empowerment around the world and challenging the myth of marriage and motherhood as a state of perpetual bliss:

As the plot deepens, Carrie has become a nag to Mr. Big about every little domestic thing. Newsflash, ladies. Domestic bliss compared to the emotional high wire can feel a bit mundane for the unprepared. In the end, finding out that as a relationship writer and expert on the topic, the one who knows more about marriage is her man. Aidan enters for the set up. All of this amidst Carrie and Mr. Big's challenge of choosing to be child-free in a world that still expects women to assume there is only one choice.

I can't lose the nanny moments come rarely, but few are funnier. Charlotte feels guilty about wanting to let out a primal mother scream because her girls are driving her insane. But Miranda comes to the rescue knowing how she feels, hoping to help Charlotte admit it over cocktails so she'll survive it all. Both mothers know how lucky they are to have help and take an emotional cocktail moment to salute the mothers who don't.

I agree with Marsh—this is a funny and very bold film which challenges conventional thinking and stereotypes. I went to the movie with two other childless/childfree women and we were thrilled that Carrie did not show regret over her childlessness like so many characters in previous Hollywood films and I was extremely pleased to hear Carrie and Mr. Big agree that "Two is Enough." I was tempted to imagine that the writers had read my book but perhaps this is just a coincidence.

What was clearly intentional was the implied acceptance of all choices that women might make and the resulting suspension of judgment, which is long overdue. Wear a burqa, or revel in your sexual appeal; have kids, or don’t have kids; adopt traditional models of family and marriage or make up your own rules. All options are embraced within the story of these four women, and that is something to celebrate!