Birthrate Update

Sorry I’ve been slow in posting here lately – there’s so much to say, I’m flummoxed on where to start!

For today, I’ll back up a bit, and point toward prognostications issued in August about the falling birth rate in 2008 and 2009. The National Center for Health Statistics tells us (here ), in preliminary stats, that the rate fell from 69.2 births per 1000 fertile women* in 2007 to a mere 68.4 in 2008. That’s a little lower than the 68.7 that held in 2006, which was a big 2% jump from the year before. The New York Times reports that preliminary statistics for the early part of 2009 document a continuing downward trend.

The ups and downs in the birth rate can be a bit confusing out of context — is .8% a lot or a little? So here’s a chart of the US rates over the past century, based on CDC data (for some reason I couldn’t make it show the 1910 data, which is 1.8 points higher [126.8] than that in 1915). 1910 is as far back as they go.

US Fertility Rates, 2915-2008

As you can see, the ups and down since 1975 have been minimal compared to the swings experienced across the preceding six decades (due to things like world wars, the Depression, the baby boom, and the arrival of hormonal birth control in 1960).

The Times story links the decline in both years to the recession — not surprising given the effect of past recessions seen above.

Will women who’ve waited for babies for career reasons now also delay further for the recession, given the dicey fertility context?

And to what degree is the decline in the birth rate in 2008 (pretty early days for the recession) reflective of a decrease in births to teens, due to states’ turning away from abstinence-only education, with its attendant rise in rates for teens in 2007?

Hang on for the official 2008 birth stats from the CDC toward year’s end. Another nail biter!

How does the baby wave look in your house and neighborhood?

And in case you didn’t see it yesterday, here’s Judith Warner’s recent blog on how it’s time for the Times and other media to stop misrepresenting women’s “choices” around work and family — because that has distorting effects on public policy. You really think so?

*”Fertile women” are officially defined as the number of women in the population 15-44 years old, but the births included in calculating the rate also include all births to anyone who happens to have one before or after that age range.

Childcare Progress

Here’s news of progress toward developing consistent standards and oversight mechanisms for childcare nationally. These funds wouldn’t add slots (though other programs may do that down the line), but they would pave the way to improving the quality of what care is available — an important factor per se and for making child care an option for many parents who need it but don’t employ it because they can’t find good, affordable care.

Initiative Focuses on Early Learning Programs
By Sam Dillon
New York Times
Sept. 19, 2009

Tucked away in an $87 billion higher education bill that passed the House last week was a broad new federal initiative aimed not at benefiting college students, but at raising quality in the early learning and care programs that serve children from birth through age 5.

The initiative, the Early Learning Challenge Fund, would channel $8 billion over eight years to states with plans to improve standards, training and oversight of programs serving infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

The Senate is expected to pass similar legislation this fall, giving President Obama, who proposed the Challenge Fund during the presidential campaign, a bill to sign in December.

Experts describe the current array of programs serving young children and their families nationwide as a hodgepodge of efforts with little coordination or coherence. Financing comes from a shifting mix of private, local, state and federal money. Programs are run out of storefronts and churches, homes and Head Start centers, public schools and other facilities. Quality is uneven, with some offering stimulating activities, play and instruction but others providing little more than a room and a television.
Read more.

Domestic Product under Fire

Lately the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – that measure of economic activity so often viewed as an indicator of national well being – has been coming in for criticism (from, among others, no less a personage than the President of France), along lines not so different from those that inspired this site:

It counts up the money spent (the total values of good produced and services provided in a country during one year), but it doesn’t consider how it was spent (dollars expended on disaster remdiation don’t signal improvement in national well being over the year prior) nor does it account for unpaid care work, which is a major factor in the well being of all citizens.

The chorus of critique emerges now because global warming and the current financial crisis make clear that short-term business profits, which are made to look like gains in wellbeing when they’re included in the GDP, have cost our environment and our long-term economy dearly. We need a system that will also reflect the negative effects of doing business, instead of seeing all business as pure positive.

French President Sarkozy (seen here with caregiver Carla Bruni) commissioned a report by two Nobel prize winners (Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen), to make recommendations on alternative means of measuring economic and social well being (click here for the report, including executive summary). They conclude that the matter needs more study, but in the long run will need to include a number of measures, rather than just one, which will then need to be aggregated in order to accurately gauge well being.

An op-ed from a few weeks back by Eric Zencey, makes related points (rather more briefly): click here to read.

How does women’s work fit into this debate? Stay tuned for the next installment….

Singing Sisterhood

Beyoncé and Taylor

Big sister Beyoncé (winner of the video of the year award) stood up for her younger sibling in the singing sisterhood at last night’s Video Music Awards – giving Taylor Swift (winner for best female video) the chance to finish her acceptance speech interrupted by Kanyé West earlier that evening, and comparing Taylor to her own younger self at the VMA’s at 17.

Here’s how it happened:
Kanyé interrupts

Beyoncé stands up

Beyoncé doesn’t just talk sisterhood here, she sings it as well, using her platform to look hard at modern love. Her winning song Single Ladies makes a case for marriage and commitment in a world where 39% of US babies are born to unmarried women, asking both the single ladies and gents in her audience to think it over.

After Taylor’s quick costume change between her two “moments,” the two stars do look a lot alike.

Here are the songs the sisters won for:
Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
You Belong with Me

Women’s Labor and Infertility

Women’s Labor and Infertility

We ladies have a special relation to the word labor–it names the work we do for pay outside the house, the work we do for free at home, and that transitional, and frequently painful, hard physical work through which many of us directly produce the next generation for the nation.

The relation among all three realms of women’s labor has been in flux for decades. New farm technologies and our expanded life-spans mean the world just doesn’t need so many babies. Our understanding of women’s work has been especially mobile since the arrival of hormonal birth control in 1960, in concert with rising education and employment options.

Given the choice, women and their partners have opted to have fewer kids, delay their arrival, or decide against them altogether. Released from old biological constraints, women have flooded the universities and climbed career ladders, redefining “women’s work” by expanding it to include just about every field of endeavor, and doubling our national talent pool.

Absent supportive work policies, delay of kids has provided a shadow benefits system. Many women waited until their salaries and their on-the-job clout had grown and they could negotiate family-friendly schedules they wouldn’t have been able to get earlier on. As a result of their trickle up, women as a group have a new status in policy discussions, a status directly linked to their use of contraception to delay the arrival of kids–-some by a few years, others by many.

In 2007, 612,000 babies were born to women 35 and over (that’s 1 in every 7 babies), of which 105,071 were to women 40-44 and 7,349 were to women 45-54 [up from 1,375 20 years prior]).* But while some delay works for most, long delay brings difficulties.

Fertility wanes, and especially quickly between 40 and 43. But the desire to form a family often increases with age, especially now that women can hope to continue fit and healthy into their 80s; they’re better off financially; they’re more likely to be in a long-term relationship; they’ve accomplished many of their work ambitions and are ready to focus on family. Though they’re ready, their bodies don’t always cooperate.

In 15 states, women who encounter infertility for whatever reason** get some degree of insurance coverage for treatments – variously including IUI, IVF and egg donation, on a model similar to health-plan birth coverage. The infertility advocacy group Resolve states on its website that two thirds of infertile couples who seek medical intervention end up with a birth. In addition, many infertile couples and singles build happy families through adoption, while others end up without kids though they had hoped to have them – a situation full of ongoing sadness even when the people involved do move on to a revised life plan with happiness of its own.

In states that mandate full coverage, the average addition to everyone’s annual health bill was $3.14 in 1995, made low through economies of scale. In the other 35 states, you’re on your own and prices are high. Some can afford to pay $12,000 each for an IVF cycle or two, others can’t.

But society as a whole benefits when all citizens who want them can have kids when they’re ready–at the most basic level because we need a next generation of workers, but at another level because we want our citizens to be happy–for charitable reasons and more pragmatically because families are often what people work for, at whatever point they start them. In the end, it’s all about the labor force. Do we want educated couples excluded from the group of parents? Among those who encounter infertility, do we want only people who can afford the high cost of treatments to procreate?

In the past 50 years women have expanded their contributions in the workplace, and their education has grown the human capital of the nation. If sufficient numbers of women trickle up and change government support systems and business practice, future generations won’t have to delay in order to have both a family and a career to support them, though they may delay for other reasons.

There are lots of complexities to the modern fertility scene, and there’s plenty of room for misuse of new technologies as well as positive use. Which is which may not always be clear at first glance. As we move forward with health care reform, the expansion of infertility insurance to meet the needs of our expanding group of citizens who want to start their families later as well as people who encounter infertility from all causes should be part of the discussion, within a wider culture of care that assumes that all our citizens and families deserve basic supports, because we are our common wealth.

*The US birthrate to women 35-39 was 47.5 in 2007 and 26.2 in 1987; to women 40-44 it was 9.5/4.4; and to women 45-54 it was 0.6/0.2 (the rates are figured per 1000 fertile women).

**Female infertility isn’t just about delay–it can occur in younger women as well and is linked to increases in STDs, to PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome–think Kate Gosselin), to endometriosis, to male factors, to environmental toxins, stress, and to other, unknown factors.

What’s It All About?

Welcome to DomesticProduct.net – a new blog exploring the evolving dynamics of women’s work, at home and outside it, just in time for Labor Day!

Tension over what properly constitutes women’s work is the crux of much of our current public discourse. That tension feeds the babble about baby bumps that fills the celebrity magazines, lies at the root of our fair pay disputes, and of our struggles over access to abortion and birth control. The 2008 election operated in part as a labor debate over what kinds of jobs women are allowed to hold (president or clothes presser, in one formulation). The endless stories on fertility, birth timing and Mommy Wars play into the debate as well.

Ever since the advent of hormonal birth control in 1960, the social fabric woven over millennia around the assumption that women were baby machines has been undergoing quick redesign throughout the world. And stirring plenty of controversy. (see Never Done and Under Paid for more on this)

It’s taken a while, but gradually women are trickling up into policy-making positions in business and government. Once there, they’re beginning to change the rules—and to move us toward a culture of care that recognizes the importance of supporting families—incubators of that most domestic of products, our citizens—at the same time that we develop work systems that allow women to contribute fully to the Gross Domestic Product in the workplace. (see Remember Mama for more on building a culture of care). But there’s far to go yet, and it’s a long process!

I’ll be posting my thoughts on some of the many sides of this big and ongoing cultural shift, along with links to related stories. Your thoughts and stories welcome!

Le Donne Son Mobili

Mobili, as in mobilizing–a poor attempt at a translingual pun (should be “si stanno mobilizzando” says my Italian friend, not “mobili” as in the line from Rigoletto). But if the pun is bad, the move is good–for Italy.

Today’s Times boasts an op-ed by Chiara Volpato on some Italian women’s response to Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi’s sexist treatment of one half of his citizenry:
Italian Women Rise Up

Pointing to big gender inequalities at home and in the workplace, very different from situations in other European countries, Volpato goes on to note that:

“The Italian media only exacerbate this bleak reality by presenting a picture of women that is incomprehensible to the rest of Europe. Private TV channels have started to broadcast images of women who are typically lightly dressed and silent beauties serving as decoration while older, fully dressed men are running the show. (It is worth noting here that Mr. Berlusconi owns the leading private television networks.)

“The impact of years of brainwashing is plain to see: recent research demonstrated that the most popular ambition among female teenagers is to become a velina (basically a showgirl). Young women and girls are consistently taught that their bodies, rather than their abilities and their knowledge, are the key to success. At the same time, the sexism portrayed on TV reinforces chauvinistic ideas among the culturally weakest parts of the population. Researchers who study female body objectification need only look to Italy to witness the sad consequences of this phenomenon.”

But women are increasingly fed up with this treatment, and are moving to change it. Bravissime!

(Volpato links the bad treatment women face in Italy to the low birthrate there, a connection made in earlier work, including a June article in the Times Magazine by Russell Shorto, called No Babies?)