“Listening to a entrepreneurial physicist talking about how to get rich!” Apparently, that was my first tweet. I’ve got no idea who the physicist was, and the get-rich advice must not have been very good—I’m still in journalism. Yet for all my forgetfulness, Twitter remembers the exact moment I came into its life: March 17, 2009 at 13:13:37. Continue reading
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The study was published earlier this month in Nature Methods.
Many thanks to Andrea Facheris of Soundtrack4u for granting permission to use the music in the video. The song is called “Symphony 5” (a reworking of Beethoven’s), by the Robot Symphony Orchestra.
This is a war story. It does have a little math, physics, and technology in it, but the real reason I’m writing about it is that Harry Baig got under my skin. Baig was a Marine, and in 1968, during the Vietnam War, he was among those trapped in a siege at Khe Sanh. Baig’s first name wasn’t actually “Harry,” it was Mirza Munir; he was Muslim, a Pakistani aristocrat who wore jodhpurs and carried a large curved sword and because he’d been educated in England while his father was an ambassador in Washington, DC, he had an English accent. Everyone said he was brilliant, he was a factor in getting the Marines out of Khe Sanh, and he died young and badly. Continue reading
May 7 – May 11
To commemorate mother’s day, Cassie starts the week by wondering whether paper/rock/scissors is a good way to trick her indecisive biological clock;
Making the case that Cassie should take the plunge, Cameron introduces us to the unforgettable stadium metaphor;
Christie says a family of two is a family too;
Jessa and Michelle explain their one-child policy;
And I clear out the room by talking about the future of artificial wombs.
Happy weekend, everyone! Next week we’ll tell you about our evil plan to dedicate an entire post each to our favourite comments of the past year.
“Mommy, why did you kill me?” was the first line of the comment. It devolved from there into a maudlin, hallucinatory, and occasionally Freudian fantasy of an aborted child’s final message to his mother, and it ended with the little guy playing baseball with God in heaven while the mother burned in hell.
The reply was brief and furious: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”
Another joined in: “When a man can get pregnant, I’ll be happy to listen to his opinions about abortion.”
The abortion flamewar I’m describing took place in 1999, and it had the honor of being my first. It was quite an education. Unfortunately, the dialogue hasn’t advanced much in the last 13 years, either on messageboards or in real life.
Anonymous Internet Person #2 was right: men can’t get pregnant. But will women always have to bear the sole responsibility and consequences for reproductive decisions that two people made? Perhaps not. Technology advances may soon allow men and women to approach parenthood from a similar perspective, by separating the act of ending a pregnancy from the act of ending the developing fetus’ life. The concept they enable is called ectogenesis, or gestation outside the womb. Not only would ectogenesis completely reframe the long-ossified abortion debate, it could also help women who have trouble carrying their own child to term, giving them an option beyond surrogacy. In the future, ectogenesis might even give indecisive women like Cassie and me the choice of offloading our pregnancy onto our male partners. But is the external uterus an inevitable reality or a fairy tale? Continue reading
Michelle and Jessa converse about the reasons we chose to stop at one child.
Jessa: So let me check I have it right: you’re an only child yourself and have an only child as well?
Michelle: That’s right, and I always thought that if I became a parent I would have an only kid. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. What about you? Do you have siblings?
Jessa: Yes, I have an older brother. I know a lot of people seem to recreate their own family structure when it comes to forming their own, but somehow that didn’t really figure in for me, for whatever reason.
Michelle: You have a boy, right? How did you decide to have only one child?
Jessa: Yes, I have a three-year-old son. It’s really a combination of factors. I think I got away with murder in terms of the personal freedom I still have, even as a mother of a young child. Mostly as a result of him having a very involved father. And I don’t want to push my luck. What was your transition to parenthood like?
Michelle: Funny, it sounds like there are some similarities — my husband is self-employed, like I am, and he was willing to share care of our daughter. So while our transition to parenthood was exhausting and confusing in all the typical ways, I really had a lot of freedom to continue my career — and I don’t think I would have the same kind of flexibility with a larger family. In some ways, I think of my job as a second child! My daughter would win in a pinch, of course, but my job is something I love and want to nurture — and it’s something that would and could take all my time if I let it. How did you and your partner arrange care?
On Monday, Cassie explained how the reproductive choices available to her felt like both a blessing and a curse. “I want to want a child,” she said, while admitting that, as of yet, she doesn’t. She’s not sure what to do.
I can’t (and won’t) tell Cassie what to do. The thing about the decision to have a baby or not is that there’s no right answer. Whichever path you take will become your life, and you’ll make it work. There’s no way to know for sure which choices will make your life most satisfying, and so, as Tim Kreider writes in his seminal essay, the Referendum, “We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated.”
As someone who’s childless by choice, I’ve been on both sides of the equation. Though I’ve never longed for a child of my own, I know that I’m forgoing a powerful human experience, and once in a while I wonder if that should bother me, before assuring myself that it doesn’t, because I’m also missing out on the inverted exorcist, the terrible twos, and the chance to fill my house with a bunch of sticky plastic crap. Continue reading
Cassie, when you proposed this series of posts—well, the truth is, I was worried. There’s nothing that seems to make a comments section ignite like someone pontificating on motherhood. And I’m embarrassed to say, I’m not quite sure if my—our—decision to have kids had much to do with science, beyond that biology might have conquered all.
There wasn’t a particular moment that settled it. What I remember was that at some point, the if in the ongoing conversation between my husband and me turned into a cautious when. Continue reading