10.25.23 MomLinks
Here's what I'm reading and listening to in the parent-sphere.
Hey moms and honorary moms! It’s Wednesday, but I’ve run the past two Sunday editions without including the usual round-ups of the mom-adjacent things I’m reading and listening to.
It’s time to fix that with some midweek MomLinks:
-The New York Times has a great start to a new series on India’s women and girls, and the pressures keeping young women out of the workforce and in economic limbo. I’ll block-quote below because the stakes are so stark:
“India’s struggle to raise millions of people into the middle class now hinges, in part, on whether young women can delay marriage in order to do paid work, or buck tradition by working outside the home after marriage. More and more Indian women are leaving the work force — or never entering it at all.
Expectations that women will confine themselves to caregiving roles at home, both to preserve their reputations and so that their unpaid labor can serve as a social and economic safety net, prevent many women from participating in public life. But even those who do manage to achieve escape velocity from the domestic sphere often find that there are few opportunities available to them.”
-Jezebel reports on the dire situation facing pregnant women in Gaza, where airstrikes have decimated medical facilities. An estimated 50,000 to 84,000 women in Gaza are pregnant.
-On Monday, Lubbock County, Texas became the state’s fourth county to pass a local ordinance banning people from using its roads to travel to out-of-state abortions. Lubbock is located near the border of New Mexico, where abortions are legal throughout pregnancy. Officials elsewhere have also floated the idea of prosecuting people who travel out of state for abortions. Alabama’s attorney general announced in August that he had the right to press charges against people who leave the state for abortion care.
-Domestic violence calls that reference “reproductive coercion” have doubled since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the 19th reports. Those cases range from preventing a partner from using contraception, to controlling a partner’s access to abortion care.
-And it’s been a banner month for stories about reproductive coercion! In her new memoir, Britney Spears alleges that she had an abortion as a young woman, because her then-partner Justin Timberlake didn’t want to become a parent. “If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” Spears writes. “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.” Let no one say abortion only benefits women! In Texas, meanwhile, a man is suing his ex-wife’s friends for $1 million each for allegedly helping her obtain abortion pills. In a filing of her own, the woman has released a transcript of a recording in which her ex-husband allegedly threatened to file the lawsuit and post an intimate video of her if she didn’t have sex with him and do his laundry.
-Last week I wrote for The Daily Beast about Scholastic’s decision to avoid censorship efforts at book fairs by… preemptively sorting some of its books about race and gender into a special collection that schools could include in the book fair upon request. The move, which prompted outcry from Black and LGBTQ+ authors, was reversed this week. “Even if the decision was made with good intention, we understand now that it was a mistake to segregate diverse books into an elective case,” Scholastic wrote in its reversal.
-Also at the Beast: the conservative Daily Wire is putting out its own children’s programming to combat Disney’s Woke Agenda or some shit. It sounds awful. Also, fans of the Australian kids’ show Bluey are accusing the Daily Wire of ripping off their beloved animation for a right-wing version about a family of homeschooled chinchillas. Every day we stray further from god’s light.
-If you’d rather listen to your news, I went on the Did Nothing Wrong podcast to discuss the MomLeft newsletter, as well as a number of goings-on on the right.
-And I loved this episode of “In Bed With The Right” that unpacks Friedrich Nietzsche’s not-so-great views on women, and how they’ve worked their way into more modern misogyny. It’s a really fun and accessible primer especially if, like me, you spend more time on Twitter than reading long-dead philosophers. Nietzsche had “enormous troll energy,” we learn. “He was a hot-taker.”
Alright, that should catch us up to speed. See you Sunday!