Thinking Globally about Adoption

Here’s a good piece on current issues in international adoption by EJ Graff, published in Democracy: The Baby Business.

She advocates requiring Hague accreditation for all international adoptions (instead of only enforcing the Hague guidelines for those countries that have signed on and allowing adoptions to continue from non-Hague countries with only very limited regulation), and outlines 8 holes that need plugging in order to make that happen.

Her article generated a lot of response from adoption experts, and those are accessible: here.

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Childlessness Up, Down and Steady: Parsing the New Pew Report

Childlessness and Later Fertility

Here’s another later-fertility story from the Pew Research Center. Last month they confirmed our suspicion that there are indeed more older moms around. This month they report that fewer women are having kids. Both reports resonate significantly with the recent 50-year anniversary of the birth control pill, confirming predictable outcomes.

But the data are not entirely clear cut. For instance, the new report begins with an oddity. The headline reads “Childlessness Up Among All Women; Down Among Women with Advanced Degrees.” The lead sentence tells us that “Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s.” It turns out, they are comparing fertility data about women ages 40 to 44 across 30 years, and the “nearly one-in-five” is specifically 18 percent.

What’s odd is that the graph the authors provide (though not the discussion) indicates that the rate of childlessness in this age group in 2000 was 19 percent. pew So, it would have been just as correct for the headline to read “Childlessness Down Among All Women.” Or “Childlessness Fairly Steady For Past 15 Years,” since, as the graph also shows, the big rate jump occurred between 1984 and 1992, when the rate went from 11 percent to 16 percent. So that change is not exactly news.[1] Data are mobile, to paraphrase Rigoletto.[2] Since headlines are often all that people take in, care in contextualizing them is important, especially about key issues like fertility and family.

Another complication comes in the use of the word “childless.” The study looks at biological childlessness, and does not include step- or adopted kids. So its focus is on the biological productivity of children by women, not on their experience or construction of family. Many parents in the not-included categories would take exception to being called childless. That’s not what the study was about, it turns out, but the title is imprecise and the terrain is muddy.

And of course “childless” itself is a fraught term. People who choose not to have kids or who couldn’t have kids but don’t want to dwell on the fact often prefer the word “childfree.” As ever, data-mining can be a minefield.

As you will have remarked by now, there are many back stories in play here, especially on the explanatory front.

Causes of trend?

• A. Increase in Voluntary Childlessness: due to birth control, increased career options and lessened social pressure, increasing numbers of women and men choose not to have kids.
• B. Increase in Delay Leading to Infertility: due to those same factors and others, many women put off trying for kids until later and some of them wait too late to have kids with their own genetic material.
(The Pew researchers cite one study of 2002 data that found among those who defined themselves as never going to have kids, these explanations split the group about half and half.)
• C. Some Are Only Temporarily Childless: they will yet have kids – either as standard issue or via egg donation or egg freezing. This category isn’t dealt with in the study.

Fertility choices of women 40 to 44 today differ from their seventies counterparts’:
Point B morphs into point C when another premise of the study–that women ages 40 to 44 are at the end of their childbearing years–is put under the microscope.

There are at least two points at issue here:

1. That 44 is the end of fertility. That was a fair working premise for the vast majority of women until recently. But whereas in 1980 only 60 previously childless American women had their first babies in the 45+ range, in 2008 2,036 women in that age range had their first baby, 34 times as many (out of a total 7,666 babies born to women in this age group, up from 1,200).

Birthrate-wise that’s an increase from 0.0 to 0.2 births per thousand women ages 45 to 49 having a first birth and from 0.2 to 0.7 among women ages 45 to 49 overall.[1] It’s still a very small group, but it’s growing at a great rate. So the report operates under the cloud of a kind of a willed delusion. Yes, it’s true that most women who don’t have kids the usual way won’t have any, but it’s also true that women who have no kids through their mid 40s have a lot more money to spend on fertility treatments than their fecund younger sisters and increasing numbers will be successful. That money, and the cultural clout that goes with it, are part of the reason they waited. And this growing option should be part of the discussion.

2. That childless 40-year-olds in 2008 are as unlikely to have kids as their counterparts in 1978. They’re not. The use of 40- to 44-year-olds as a group with the same standard fertility prospects is very problematic because it’s physically untrue (one study indicated that roughly 66 percent are fertile at age 40, 50 percent at age 41, and then a quick downhill to 13 percent at 45).[4] In the past however, it may have seemed true, for social reasons. Back in the day there was a lot of pressure on women to marry and have kids young, so very few women who intended to have kids entered their 40s without any.

But now many women do delay their first child til 40 and beyond, and many of those women will yet have kids — which means they will leave the realm of the “childless” after their 40th birthday in larger proportion than women did in the past. And indeed, in 2008 the group of mothers 40 and up was the only group to buck the downward recessionary birth trend and show an increased birth rate (up 4 percent). This too should be part of the discussion.

There’s plenty more to say on all this, it’s complicated, and good data are hard to find– but this is the morphing world we live in and we have to keep track of lots of dynamics at once when talking about contemporary fertility, which is both highly politicized and highly personal. The Pew report offers a nice opportunity to open up the discussion of the realities of modern fertility, but let’s look hard at the data before we accept the headline analysis. There’s a lot still to be determined.

I’ll be writing on the education angle later.

This post appeared first on RH Reality Check.

[1] Interestingly, the CPS data seem to differ from the National Survey of Family Growth data cited in the Pew report’s footnotes, which gives 15% as the total childless figure for 2002 (6 percent voluntary, 6 percent involuntary, 2 percent temporary, 1 percent unaccounted for) and 12 percent for 1982. Abma, Joyce C., and Gladys M. Martinez. “Childlessness Among Older Women in the United States: Trends and Profiles.” Journal of Marriage and Family, 68:4. (2006).
[2] It would be interesting to see a graph of this trend for the whole 20th century – it’s been so up and down on the fertility front. Expanded graphs often enrich the story, but the data is not always available.
[3] Though women 50-54 are also included in the numerator since there are so few.
[4] They are linked here because that’s the way the statistics are gathered, in five-year groups.

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What’s it worth to you?

What’s a Mother’s Work Worth to You?

Here’s one of those stories that tells you what the work you’re doing at home would be paid if you had to hire someone else to do it. The work done was based on time-use reports by 28,000 moms. This is presumably supposed to tell us something about the value of this work, but it’s a pretty shifty business.

Stay-at-home moms by this account would get $117,856, and moms with outside jobs would earn $71,860 above their regular salary. Overtime is a big factor in these calculations — so if you were looking to save on your equivalent (the cost of having someone else do it), you’d just hire two people to split the jobs and the salary would drop substantially.

If you have kids, is this kind of report consoling or depressing to you? And why?

If you’re thinking about kids, how does this kind of report affect your thought process?

Do the big numbers emphasize the big value of mom’s work, or do they emphasize the long hours and the amount she’s actually underpaid? Does it seem like a rigorously defined data point, or a dubious exercise to begin with, underlining the big disparities in pay scales in the real world for people who work in care industries and those in the “professional” world where this kind of salary actually gets paid.

The assumption seems to be that you would hire someone from the big economy to do the jobs — but the evidence is that a middle class woman could easily hire another woman (or two) for much less than this to take over the majority of her functions, and many people do. The poor are always with “us” — because “we” hire them at reduced wages. They’re in the kitchen, the nursery, and the garden, and in equivalent “unskilled” positions around town.

Of course a big part of the job of mothering is about what someone else couldn’t or wouldn’t do–that special extra value that “only a mother” can add. And specifically about evading the paid economy. If cash payment was required, a lot of this work wouldn’t get done, because few people could afford it. Family is another word for venture capital, of both monetary and non-monetary kinds. For lots of reasons, some economic, some sentimental, motherhood as we know it is all about NOT getting paid.

These salary numbers remind me of the ads that invite you to save huge amounts on things you don’t need by buying now, to which you respond with your own calculation about how much more you’re saving by not buying at all. There’s something wrong with the premise here too, to do with the fact that incommensurate systems of valuation are being linked here (paid work vs. unpaid; men’s pay scale vs women’s pay scale), but we’re pretending they’re commensurate.

Instead of estimating the value of a mother’s work in terms completely foreign to the reality of what real moms or their surrogates in the world of housework are paid, better to work toward fixing the field within which these values are determined. We could start by improving moms’ real ability to work for a fair wage and to not lose ground on pay scale when they have kids, whether or not they step out to care for them for a while. Likewise, the lack of a national system of decent, affordable childcare — available to about 10% of workers today –is a big part of why many people stay home actively NOT earning $117,856. Pay equity. Childcare. Those are the values that would make a real difference to many moms today.

Pay equity for female workers would offer more options to families of all classes (with one parent or with two) to choose how they want to structure their workloads and their care arrangements, especially if good childcare, part time or full time, wasn’t so expensive.

A national childcare program could involve some compensation for moms who decide to stay at home with their kids (think “child allowance”). Kids are, after all, not just their private indulgences but the nation’s future citizens, and worth some national investment.

Bottom line: we need more upfront discussion of the real-world economics of childrearing and of women’s work than fantasy numbers like $117K invite.

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Thinking ahead?

Here’s a NY Times piece I was interviewed for, re older moms and the Pew study — which turned out to focus on the fact that if you’re a later mom you’ll also likely be a later grandma and maybe not see your grandkids if your kids have kids later too. This is not my worry, but hey, to each her own.

For me, it’s one of those unpredictables–currently I’m more concerned about the long-term effect of the local oil spill. My take is eat healthy and have fun now. And get to the gym regularly – I missed the gym part last few months and now, having returned, I’m very sore! But not for long.

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Planning Motherhood: The Pill and Socioeconomic Change

Sunday May 9th was both Mother’s Day and the 50th anniversary of the announcement that the birth control pill would be approved for wide use – a move that redefined the dynamics of motherhood and transformed the lives of women, men and their kids, both physically and socially. In the US, the birthrate fell 44% in the 15 years after 1960, and has basically stayed there since. The average woman has 2.05 kids these days, down from 3.6 kids in the 1950s.

While it’s often discussed in personal terms, birth control has major positive public outcomes that directly affect the economy and the polity. But obstacles remain to realizing the full value. It’s time for the follow through that will allow all women to participate robustly in the paid economy while raising the citizens who will sustain future prosperity. The two are intimately linked.

Birth control itself wasn’t new in 1960 (the average births per woman fell from 7.0 to 3.5 between 1800 and 1900, due in some part to the invention of rubber), but the reliability and the context were. As Elaine Tyler May notes, the pill could gain acceptance only within an already-shifting social framework of expanding educational options and diminishing social constraints for women. But within that frame, it moved women’s progress to a new stage, allowing us to not only limit the number of our kids but to delay their birth while we first went to school and then established in the work-place.

Delay unraveled the old social fabric, woven for millennia around the assumption that women would be baby machines, devoting their lives to producing and raising the next generation. It was the flood of babies demanding care who for ages kept women out of schools and, as a result, out of power. Public policy does not reflect women’s interests because they have never been full participants in its making. But delay has made it possible for women to begin to be heard. Gradually women are trickling up into the business and government hierarchies, though their numbers are still low (17% of Congress , 15% of board directors and 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are female).

The new Pew Research Center report documents the demographic shift toward older, more educated moms over the past 20 years. The teen birthrate is down 30% from 1990, and the rates for moms 20-29 are down as well, while births to moms 30-34 are up 22%, up 48% for moms 35-39, and up 80% for moms 40-44. CDC reports allow us to track further back toward the root of the upward trend. Where, in 1970, 1 in 16 births overall was to a mom 35+, it was 1 in 11 in 1990 and 1 in 7 in 2008. Where in 1970, 1 in 100 first births was to a woman 35 or over, it was 1 in 22 in 1990 and it’s one in 12 today .

On the big scale, limiting population growth at a time when technology had cut the need for agricultural workers and the earth was getting crowded had clear benefits. At the micro level, birth control allowed families to decide how many kids they wanted (if any) and when, freeing young women and men to develop their own human capital before kids arrived and to invest more of that capital in each child when they became parents.

Educated women transform our workforce demographics in several ways: Not only do they raise fewer but more educated workers – necessary for the emerging economy – but they themselves add to the educated workforce – replacing the children they did not bear. They also live – and work – longer, due in part to the fact that they’re having fewer kids. Clearly the demographics of work are shifting.

Up until recently, women’s work has been limited to bearing and rearing the workforce for free (perversely framed as merely a private pleasure and not included in the GDP though essential to it) and/or to work outside the home in a restricted set of jobs (teacher, nurse, cook, cleaner, secretary, sex worker) all linked to the work they were doing at home for free – to which they were constrained by their limited education (due to early childbearing) and because they often needed part-time work with flexible schedules to care for kids since no good affordable childcare was available. The large pool created by this constraint meant that they faced lots of competition within those few trades, so their wages have been low. The fact that the same tasks were done for free at home, contributed to the general expectation that they were not worth much.

But when sex and babies cease to be directly linked, business and government risk losing their major underwriter—the moms. Indeed, that’s what’s happened in countries like Japan and Italy, where the number of births is well below the 2.1 kids/couple replacement rate – at 1.2 and 1.3 respectively. These low rates link to lack of supportive policies for women who want to combine work and childrearing. Given the enormous amount of labor and cost and the lack of social power that motherhood involves, it’s not surprising that many find it unattractive. In the Pew study, 24% of childless women of childbearing age said they did not plan to have any kids.

The introduction of the Pill 50 years ago was an important step in the process of re-gendering the work world, but we still have far to go to reach an environment that supports the production of good citizens and workers by non-exploitative means. Which is to say, an environment that pays fair wages for work done regardless of gender; recognizes the work of childrearing as a contribution to the nation; supports working families with access to a national system of good, affordable childcare; and makes it possible for women to raise children without sacrificing the chance to build a career and contribute to the wider economy over the long-term. Moves to limit access to birth control can be understood in an economic light, as moves to limit progress toward fair work for a fair wage.

As Houston mayor Annise Parker noted recently, putting women in the policy-making mix changes both “HOW issues are debated and WHAT issues are debated.” This Mother’s Day, we could celebrate mom and the progress birth control has enabled over the past 50 years toward giving women an equal voice in the shaping of business and public policy. Now we can get back to work toward the goal.

This originally appeared on RH Reality Check.

Elizabeth Gregory is the author of Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood (Basic Books).

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The New Demography of American Motherhood

Lots of news stories lately on the later motherhood trend, including this new report from the Pew Research Center that documents that in fact there are lots more older moms than twenty years ago, and fewer teen moms. Not news around here – but nice that they are featuring the data. See earlier posts for lots more analysis of later motherhood dynamics.

KJ Dell’Antonia at Slate points out that media fascination with young moms does not a real-world trend make — instead it’s faux fertility facts.

Ladies, and gentlemen, you heard it all here first — or maybe you heard it in your own circle of friends and relations — since all these stories are, after all, reporting on us, not on the pronatalist fantasies of screen writers and journalists.

I intended to post a Mother’s Day story today — on the profound coincidence of dates this year, when Mother’s Day and the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the approval of birth control both fall this Sunday. But that was delayed by actual mothering stuff, so I’ll have it up for you next week! That will include some discussion of the Pew data, as will the post after that, if all goes as planned.

In the mean time, I’ll refer you to my Mother’s Day post of last year, which is still apropos: Remember Mama.

Happy Mother’s Day one and all.

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