Last week NYTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof endorsed major investment in early childhood education as the only way out of poverty for millions -- the only way to even the playing field for all citizens. This has been the elephant in the room for so long, the words you're...

Data can always be variously interpreted. Yesterday, the CDC published a report called "Recent Decline in Births in the United States, 2007-2009." And clearly the overall rate is down, as are the specific rates in most categories.  But not all.* Births to women 40-44 were up...

The tighter belts being worn of late are leaving less room for baby bumps. According to data released in December by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, births for 2009 continued the downward trend begun in 2008, and 2010 data indicate more of the same. Falling birthrates...

At first blush, the debate over the Paycheck Fairness Act may not look like part of our ongoing national fertility discourse. But the two kinds of "women's work" -- the labor done outside the home (for 23 percent less pay than for men), and the bearing and rearing...

I know I'm behind. Awful busy is my term of choice. As in awful. Not short for awfully. Well, it's partly awful, partly just hectic, partly fabulous -- having a family and a job and lots to do. Mostly they're good things, and eventually most do get done.

But how...

New data from the National Center for Health Statistics show that the both the U.S. crude birthrate and the fertility rate fell in 2009, hand in hand with the falling economy, continuing the trend begun in 2008. People don't want to have kids they can't afford -- basically...

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...

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...

Hot on the heels of last month's fertility scaremongering about ovarian reserve came a new scare for women planning to start late-in-life families, this one about autism. Once again, reporting on it ignored essential facts and skewed the takeaway.

The recent UCDavis study exploring the effect...

When Houston elected Annise Parker in December and became the biggest city yet with an openly gay mayor, a lot of us got surprised comments from out-of-towners: "Who knew Houston was a liberal town," cheered my friend Liz in...

Childless women of all ages are under assault in America. If you're a teenager, you're pushed toward motherhood by "moralizers" bent on denying you information about, and access to, birth control. If you're a women 35 and older, you've been subject to a decade of news stories set to the...

Like quite a few people I know, I had my first child in my late thirties--39 to be exact. My maternal grandmother had a child at 39, too, but that girl was her eighth baby...

Motherhood seems like a basically ecological undertaking. People who spend time feeding and nurturing the young can be expected to take an interest in keeping the food pure, the parks pleasant, and the air breathable. The very act of giving birth is itself all about recycling -- moving the DNA...

Following up on his plan to move beyond the GDP to more adequate measures of national well-being that include unpaid care work, French President Nicholas Sarkozy has proposed a new plan to advance gender equity: a scheme...

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...