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This company and this state that just don’t have their priorities straight.
An Ohio woman was fired for taking unauthorized breaks for pumping breast milk. She sued, stating that the firing was sexual discrimination. Here’s a story on the matter.
While the Ohio supreme court ruled against her, it was a close call. One judge, Justice Paul E. Pfeifer, disagreed with the ruling, and wrote “The appellate court does not explain why Allen’s trips to the restroom outside scheduled break times were different from the restroom trips other employees made outside scheduled break times. There is no evidence in the record about any limit on the length of unscheduled restroom breaks and no evidence that employees had to seek permission from a supervisor to take an unscheduled restroom break. There is evidence only that unscheduled bathroom breaks were allowed and that LaNisa Allen was fired for taking them. What made her breaks different?”
I agree. A milk pumping break is no different than a bathroom break.
Here in Colorado, we have a law that requires any employer of more than two employees to provide reasonable break time for nursing mothers to pump breast milk, as well as a private place to do it that isn’t a bathroom stall. We have enacted this law because it is best for public health and workplace efficiency. Mothers who nurse their children miss less work because their children do not get sick as often. The mothers also get sick less often, they are less likely to suffer from post partum depression and some studies suggest that nursing reduces your chances of developing breast cancer. Children who are nursed, in addition to getting sick less often, are less likely to become obese, develop allergies, get cavaties, are less picky eaters (and therefore more likely to eat healthy as adults). Breastmilk is also cheaper than formula, which frees up mothers to spend money on more important things, such as better health care, healthier foods, better education for her child, etc.
Mothers who nurse and children who drink breast milk are healthier. This equals less work missed by the mother, less school missed by the child later in life, and less of a burden on our health care system. Both mother and child are able to be more productive members of society and more productive workers in the long run. Encouraging mothers to nurse creates better citizens and making it easier for them to continue nursing after going back to work makes their lives and jobs happier and easier, meaning they will be more productive.
It is in our nations best interest to encourage mothers to nurse and to do what it takes to make it easy for them. Apparently the State of Ohio and the company this woman worked for (Isotoner) were too short sighted to see that.
Many mother’s groups are calling for a boycott of Isotoner and I agree. I don’t buy their products anyhow, but I certainly never will now.
Here are my birthday wishes for today, my 26th birthday.
- I wish everyone in this country had access to top quality health care. Health care that includes as many holistic options as conventional ones.
- I wish single mothers got paid as much as married mothers. I wish mothers got paid as much as single women. And I wish all women got paid as much as men.
- I wish parents who abandoned their children would be held accountable for their actions, and that conservative talking heads would stop spouting cruelty about the parents who actually do stick around.
- I wish every consenting adult is able to make a legal commitment binding them in love to any other consenting adult.
- I wish the government would stop subsidizing junk food.
- I wish the whole world would go see Food Inc. and The Business of Being Born.
- I wish you would become a fan of Rock Your Birth Doula Services on Facebook.
- I wish all single moms, and especially all single pregnant women, would read Mari Gallion’s book, The Single Woman’s Guide to a Happy Pregnancy.
- I wish that President Obama would actually do something worth getting the Republicans this angry.
- I wish people would start voting for third parties.
- I wish world governments would take the 350 goals seriously.
- I wish Whole Foods hadn’t bought out Wild Oats, and Wild Oats hadn’t bought out Alfalfa’s.
- I wish Placebo hadn’t cancelled their American tour.
- I wish this country and culture would make ease of breast feeding for all women a top priority.
- I wish the United States had a maternity leave policy like Canada does. One year off at 60% of your pay, plus one optional year off, unpaid.
- I wish mothering were recognized as the full time job that it is.
- I wish men would stop lying about how tall they are.
- I wish companies built consumer goods to last, instead of to break, become obsolete, or go out of style within a year or two (or less!).
- I wish we’d get serious about alternative fuel and energy resources.
- I wish CAFOs would go away.
- I wish we would crack down on companies who hire illegal immigrants, instead of cracking down on the illegal immigrants individually. Companies who hire illegal immigrants usually do it so that they can commit grievous human rights violations without fear of penalty.
- I wish we focused more on Fair Trade and less on NAFTA.
- I wish all chemicals had to be tested for safety before they are put on the market in consumer goods.
- I wish drug companies weren’t allowed to advertise to the general public.
- I wish there were an ocean in Colorado, and also a place where avocados, bananas and citrus fruit would grow, then I would have no problem going to an entirely local diet.
- I wish I could speed read.
- I wish that I will be able to send Elijah to schools that don’t focus on standardized tests, especially not in Kindergarten. On that note, I wish every parent in America would read Crisis in the Kindergarten.
- I wish I was a size 10 again.
- I wish my mouse would stop doing the weird stuff its doing.
Now I’m going to go make some potato soup for my birthday meal. Yum.
The CDC is talking about making routine circumcision a recommended procedure for all newborn males in this country to prevent the spread of HIV, based on some studies done in Africa that seemed to conclude that circumcision may reduce the chances of contracting HIV in heterosexual males through sex.
The studies were done in Africa, where most men are un circumcised. Volunteers came in to participate in the studies, and men were given the choice whether or not they wanted to be circed, rather than randomly assigning, which makes the studies biased right there.
The studies were also flawed in that the study groups were too small to get an accurate conclusion and there were no controls, basically setting the study up to support the hypothesis. That is not science.
How does circumcision prevent the spread of HIV? That is a question that these studies have failed to answer because they have not been conducted scientifically. For all we know, the spread of HIV in these studies could have easily been less in circumcised men because the circumcised men were more hesitant to show their unusual looking penis, and therefore had less promiscuous sex. In fact, a look at these studies makes that seem very likely indeed. Until I can be given an explination as to how circumcision prevents the spread of HIV, I can’t believe these studies. They just don’t make sense.
Furthermore, even the CDC is quite clear on the fact that circumcision would have very little effect on AIDS rates here IF (and its a big if) the conclusions of these African studies are correct. Most AIDS transmissions in this country take place between gay males and drug users, these studies say nothing about circumcision protecting from transmission in these cases.
Even if we can conclude that these studies are correct, the alleged effectiveness rate of circumcision in preventing HIV is still WAY below the effectiveness of condoms, and leagues below limiting sexual parters. I see very little justification for making a recommendation for a surgical procedure that carries a long list of risks when there are more effective, cheaper, and less dangerous preventative measures out there.
We need more scientificly based studies to confirm this alleged link between circumcision and reduced HIV rates. Remember, only 15% (most of whom are Muslims) of the world’s male population is circumcised, so clearly there are large pockets of uncircumcised populations (say, Europe) where AIDS is not as big of a problem as it is here, where some 75% of men are circumcised. Those are some large numbers that suggest these studies may not be accurate enough to start suggesting routine circumcision.
I think its seriously flawed to start telling people that being circumcised is going to protect them from HIV. It has about the same effectiveness rate as the pull out method does in preventing the spread of HIV. I’d hate to see the country take this as an excuse to no longer use condoms. Circumcised men contract and pass on HIV every day!
I just want to start this out by saying that I don’t think being a single parent means that your child is going to grow up to be a criminal. I think that the children of single parents, given that everything else in their lives is the same as children in dual parent households, are just as likely to become criminals as any other child.
I think we’ve all heard people (particularly people of certain political bents) talk about how being a child of a single mother is the #1 indicator of whether or not a child is going to grow up to be a criminal, or a drug addict, or another single parent, etc. On the surface, the statistics sort of lean that way, so I can see why people might come to that conclusion. But statistics are notoriously inaccurate, and can be made to say anything.
If we were to conduct a scientific study to determine whether or not those statistics do represent the truth, we would need to observe from conception to adulthood, a large number of children who were all EXACTLY the same (in economic status, education access, education level of the parents, the parenting style of their parents, work habits of the parents, number of siblings, number of aunts/uncles/grandparents/cousins, how far extended family is from them, type of community grown up in, dietary preferences, cultural histories, etc) in every way, except half of them would come from single parent homes, and half of them would come from dual parent homes. We would need to observe them from conception to adulthood to make sure all variables stay the same, and see how many of the children from each group became criminals. We would need them to be the same in every other way so we can isolate the status of their parent’s marriage as the only possible contributing factor towards whether or not these children become criminals (that’s called a control).
Obviously, this could never be done. You’d be hard pressed to find four kids who could fit this description, let alone the thousands it would take to get an accurate scientific conclusion. So to start with, we have to take any kind of interpretation of the statistics with a grain of salt. How many other factors could contribute to the children becoming criminals? There are no controls in those studies.
But lets for a minute, pretend they are true. Pretend in some magical universe we were actually able to scientifically prove that being the child of a single parent makes you more likely to grow up to be a criminal.
What in God’s name would make anyone think that this is the single mother’s fault?
These people go on and on about how important it is to have two parents. So why isn’t it the dead beat dad’s fault that the child grows up to be the criminal? Why are we placing blame on the one parent who actually sticks around and lives up to their responsibility? If both are so important, don’t both bear at least equal responsibility?
If dads are so important, then isn’t it their fault if the children grow up to be criminals in their absence? I mean, its at least as much their fault as it is the mothers, right? So why does all their blame fall on the single mother?
Single mothers are bad parents?
Dads who abandon their children bear no responsibility for any negative outcomes abandonment produces?
Now, there are lots of different kinds of single mothers. The Anne Coulters of this world seem to have it out for single mothers by choice. Women who, for a variety of reasons, choose to have children outside of marriage. Of course, only single mothers who willfully deny a father to their children are bad, right? The Anne Coulters of this world do not seem to take into account us mothers who did not want to be single mothers, but are doing the best we can to raise our children on our own, because the men who sired them refused to take responsibility. Single mothers NOT by choice far outnumber single mothers by choice, and we did not push our childrens’ fathers out, they abandoned us. They abandoned their children.
The Anne Coulters of the world over look the fact that the children of single mothers by choice are much less likely, according to the statistics, to grow up to be criminals. Single mothers by choice are more likely to be financially stable, well educated and healthy, they planned their pregnancies and had preparation opportunities that unplanned pregnancies don’t have, among a variety of other factors that very likely play a significant role in whether or not a child grows up to be a criminal.
So if the majority of single mothers who are “creating” the statistic that these people deplore are not single mothers because they want to be, but rather because the men they were with ran away and refused to take responsibility, isn’t it the dead-beat-dad’s fault that these children are growing up to be criminals (or whatever) and not the moms fault? Isn’t it the fault of the person who ran away? The person who created the single parent household?
Anne Coulter recently wrote a book with a chapter titled, “Victim of a Crime? Thank a single mother”. She is entitled to her unscientific review of the statistics, I suppose. But I don’t understand why she wouldn’t title the chapter “Victim of a Crime? Thank a dead-beat-dad”. Why is it the mother’s fault that these children grow up to be criminals? Why isn’t it the dad who ran away’s fault? What Anne is basically saying here is that an absent father does more good raising a child than a present mother does. That a mother alone is a danger to a child, and only the presence of a father can undo that danger. But the absence of a father is not a big deal, as long as the child isn’t left with a mother.
If this is the case, perhaps then the Anne Coulters of the world should support gay adoption. Surely two fathers are even better than a father and a mother! Of course, I suppose they would be REALLY against lesbian adoption. Two mothers must be even worse than one single mother!
Its just ridiculous. These people are just spiteful and sexist. I would have a lot more respect for their views (even though I disagree with them) if they would hold all parties equally responsible.
This society does not hold men responsible for parenting (as the “single moms are responsible for violent crime” hypothesis proves), and yet bemoans men’s lack of parental rights. I have said it a million times, rights exist only in conjunction with responsibility. When men have equal responsibility, they will get equal rights.
This article in the New York Times features a friend of mine from Holistic Moms. She was denied health coverage because of her previous c-section.
This brings up some interesting ideas. We have the highest c-section rate in the world, yet it has not improved our birth outcomes any. In fact, I learned in my doula training that the US is 32nd in the world for positive birth outcomes.
Obviously, caesareans can be life saving operations, and thank god we have them, but why do countries who have 10% caesarean rates have better mother and infant mortality rates than the US, who has a 30% caesarean rate? Does that suggest that maybe caesareans are being performed that don’t have to be? Does it not say that 60% of the c-sections performed in this country could probably be skipped (or prevented), with potentially better results?
Women don’t get a lot of choice about whether or not they’re going to have a c-section in this country. There are ways to avoid it, but most women are not educated as to how, or even why, they should attempt to avoid a c-section. C-sections are quicker and more profitable for hospitals and insurance companies, in the long run, and have a CYA feel to them that is believable by those who don’t know much about normal birth (which is most everyone in this country). They are even more profitable if insurance companies are able to charge customers more after they have one.
So who’s a little freaked out? I’m not going to lie, I am a little. Sure, more people die of the regular flu every year than are dying from this flu. And more people contract TB every year than have contracted this flu. And I read a horrifying statistic the other day that one in every 38 American boys has autism, (talk about an epidemic!) but you don’t hear a lot of panic about these things on the news.
Still, I’m a little freaked out. I’m freaked out partially because of the swine flu itself, and partially because I’m afraid of what the government’s reaction to the swine flu might be. Not to mention the people out there who are also freaked out.
That’s all I’m going to say about this, because I think it might be being talked about too much.
I am sick though, and Elijah has been too. Cue ominous music.
President Obama last night declared that health care reform would be essential for fixing the economy. With that in mind, here is a petition that is being submitted full of ideas for reforming health care so that it is fair for all and truely promotes health, instead of treating syptoms. It addresses issues such as freedom of choice in health care, alternative medicine, tax incentives for purchases that increase health (such as gym memberships) and proposes a free market friendly version of universal health care which covers everyone while still allowing for choice of health care provider and competition in the market place to drive innovation and bring prices down.
Please follow the link below, read about the proposal, and sign the petition. The more people who sign, the more likely it will be that we will have a health care system like this one day.
This is copy and pasted directly from an email I got. Please sign!
Friday is the last day to voice your opinion on whether the EPA — the Environmental Protection Agency — should regulate carbon dioxide pollution, the primary cause of the climate crisis. This is a big deal.
The EPA is taking public comment, before making a ruling.
Of course, special interests — like the oil and coal lobbies — are working overtime to defeat a positive ruling and have already gotten thousands of comments submitted in opposition.
Most people don’t know about this opportunity for public comment, so your voice can make a real difference. And with a new president in the White House, it’s likely that someone will actually be listening. Submit your public comment to the EPA here:
http://www.RepowerAmerica.org/EPA
In April 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide if it is harming our health and welfare. After more than a year of delay, the EPA is finally now requesting public comments on whether carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants are endangering our health and our climate.
Join us, and send a message about how crucial it is to reduce harmful carbon dioxide pollution. That you expect the EPA to use its powers to protect our health and welfare. That we can “Repower America” by using energy sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, and make the switch to 100% clean electricity. And that the solutions to the climate crisis are the same ones needed to address our economic and security challenges.
This is our chance to go on the public record — all the comments will be posted on the EPA’s website. To post your public comment, just go here.
For nearly eight years, the Bush administration has done nothing to address the growing threats we face from global warming. Hurricanes are getting stronger, the North polar icecap is melting, and we’ve suffered through intense droughts, floods and killer heat waves.
The deadline is November 28th. Let’s help end the era of delay.
Thanks,
Cathy Zoi
CEO
www.RepowerAmerica.org
