Senator Jon Kyl made headlines recently by proposing that maternity care shouldn't be covered by health insurance because he didn't need it. When Senator Debbie Stabenow noted that his mother probably did, Senator Kyl replied that "That was more than 60...

Big sister Beyoncé (winner of the video of the year award) stood up for her younger sibling in the singing sisterhood at Sunday's Video Music Awards - giving Taylor Swift (winner for best female video) the chance to finish her acceptance speech interrupted...

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....

We hear often about later moms these days, but less about the new later dads who've walked hand and hand with those moms into the modern world of birth timing. While it's always been possible for men to have kids later than women...

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Recently Wanda Sykes (47) and her wife Alex (wed in California, October 2008) joined the growing ranks of gay parents, as these first-time moms celebrated the birth of twins. Sykes has described herself "proud to be a woman, proud to be a black...

Motherhood changed utterly on the day after Mother's Day 1960. That's when the FDA approved the birth control pill for general use, and women at long last could become mothers by choice rather than by default. Immediately the birth rate fell, down...

We've heard a lot recently about how this recession is affecting men's jobs more than women's. But while women's relative labor-force participation rises in recessions, most of the jobs women hold on to earn small wages and low status. In the long-term, recessions can have very negative effects on women's...

As jobs disappear, stocks plummet and credit freezes, many of us are cutting expenses and looking for ways to save. This is new territory for most of us, who've grown up in the age of disposability and more, more, more. But it's familiar ground to the old folks, who made...

Woman gives birth at 70 -- isn't that ridiculous? Or worse, isn't it unethical, to bear kids you might not be around to see into adulthood?

Those aren't my questions -- they're the undertow in all the reporting on the latest installment in the "how late can you wait"...

In presenting his plan for an economic recovery last week, President-elect Obama spoke of creating 2.5 million jobs by 2011--jobs that would both address the immediate crisis and work as long-term growth engines, by shoring up our crumbling infrastructure and laying the groundwork for the alternative energy industries of the...

Polly Bergen played the mother of the first female President in ABC's Commander in Chief a few seasons back with a wink to those who remembered her past. Back in 1965 Bergen also played the first female POTUS, in a movie called Kisses for My President.

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First there's the evident unreadiness - you just can't fake that. As Palin's interviews unroll against the backdrop of the unraveling national economic mess, voters of all parties are blanching at the idea that their families' or the nation's future might end up in her hands, fun lady though she...

Six days post-hurricane, the lights came on at my house. Our family became part of the 50.2% (now 64%) of the population of Houston with power, members of a new elite-- temporary, we can hope, and as random as any other. Amazing how quickly things can change: one minute thrown...

This year Labor Day and Women's Equality Day bookend the week: a timely conjunction, since tension over what properly constitutes women's work is the crux of much of our current public discourse.

That concern feeds the babble about baby bumps that fills the celebrity magazines, lies at the root...

"More Women Than Ever Are Childless, Census Finds" read last week's NY Times headline. Both the claim and the rather alarmist phrasing ("more than ever!") may have confused readers who recalled the December 2007 headline for the story on the annual CDC birth data (gathered from birth certificates), which told...

Parents had a big year in 1908 -- our modern Mother's Day had its start that May in a church in West Virginia. Inspired by that service, and in the shadow of a mining disaster that killed many local dads, the first Father's Day followed fast, two months later and...

What's in a mom? On any other day she might smell as sweet, but we give her particular credit (and roses) on the second Sunday of May. It's been this way for 100 years.

Our modern Mother's Day was born a century ago (on May 10, 1908 -- in...

Congratulations to Cate, to Halle, and to all the new Hollywood moms and their families! At 38 Cate is the latest in a long line of later Hollywood moms. Last month it was Halle at 41, before that J.Lo with twins at 38, Salma at 41, Marcia - 44, Tina...

What do Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama have in common? They all began their families at relatively advanced ages. Hillary was 32 when she had Chelsea in 1980, Laura was 35 when the twins arrived in 1981, and Michelle was 34 and 37 at the births of her...