If you have a few minutes, read this article about initiatives to prevent unplanned pregnancies among community college students.  If you don’t, here’s a summary: community colleges don’t have health centers, and often CCs serve populations that wouldn’t otherwise have access to birth control, for financial, logistical, or other reasons.  So, says this article, we need to get those kinds of services onto CC campuses in order to help young women prevent unplanned pregnancies and thus finish their CC degrees.  Long story short: info and services related to pregnancy prevention shouldn’t be limited to high schools.

Ok, so.  I’m kind of surprised by my reaction to this.  Because, on the one hand, yes, unwanted unplanned pregnancies suck ass, and if you find yourself in that situation, it’s important to have access to birth control, emergency contraception, or abortion.

However.

Doesn’t this stink a little bit of classism to y’all? I’m not talking about the issue itself, I’m talking about the way the issue is treated in the article.  The assertion is that unplanned pregnancies occur in high rates among single women in their 20s, and that these pregnancies are probably unwanted, and if they are wanted, they shouldn’t be.

Right? Is that how it sounds? Or am I getting all weird and fundamentalist-y?

I guess I’m bothered by that core assumption that unplanned pregnancy = unwanted pregnancy. I’m also bothered by the notion that a pregnancy must be either wanted 100% or unwanted 100%.  Can I get a little nuance up in here?  Because I hate to break it to the patriarchy, but a good lot of us hover around the 50-90% mark most of the time.  When I found out I was pregnant, I freaked the hell out.  I didn’t actively consider abortion, but I did think, “Well, this isn’t the best time for this, and I’m not sure I can handle this.” Am I glad I’ve got a little dude sleeping on my belly right now?  Indeed.  But that doesn’t mean I was dreaming of onesies and playgroups from day one.*

So I guess what bugs me is this: my pregnancy was unplanned, but hey, that’s cool with my university because I’m 30 and married, and I’m in school but I’ve already got an M.A.  So finishing my degree isn’t that important to anyone but me and the fam.**  But if you’re, say, 21 and unmarried, all of the sudden folks have the right to judge the appropriateness of your pregnancy to their institution. NOT that people didn’t judge mine, and continue to judge it.  But those are individuals, not systems, doing the judging.  Big Difference.

Again, I’m not saying that these services SHOULDN’T be provided, because we all know that one thing this country definitely needs more of is cheap and convenient access to birth control. But by likening CCs to high schools, you’re saying that a 25 year old is as immature and incapable of making decisions as a 15 year old, and that’s just not true.  It’s troubling, too, that the people who want to help women gain access to birth control sound just as controlling and condescending as the people who want to take away our right to abortion.

Perhaps most of all I’m bothered by the emphasis on “retention rates,” which, again, would be cool if The Man were worried about the fact that these women want, and need, to get their degrees.  But what they’re really worried about is money, and the fact that pregnant student = drop out = less money in the bank for the CC.  Show me a woman-centered approach to this topic (free day care, anyone?), and maybe we can talk.

*Let me just remind everyone that we actually thought we were going into this marriage with fertility problems, so on one level we were SUPER super happy to know that we could conceive.  But we obviously didn’t time it, because we didn’t think we had anything to time.  So it was a bit of a mindfuck of, hey, praise be! my uterus works!  But, um, did it have to work right now?  BUT! Don’t take it away, god-like entity who might punish me for not being thankful 24/7!  Yeah, because in addition to the whole “your baby might not have a chin! and you might need an abortion at 22 weeks!” thing, we didn’t think we’d be able to get pregnant without the help of Science. So when I freaked out about being pregnant I automatically assumed that Ye Gods would have their way with me because I didn’t leave cookies on the hearth in their honor or something.  And to a degree, I still freak out about that, which is why I’m always qualifying statements about the unplanniness of The Baby.

** They’re also spending more on me than they make, but that’s a whole other issue.

I’ve written a page in a week.  I cannot work in short bursts.  I cannot.  I try, but I can’t write.  I can think, and jot, but not compose.

Translation: I am seriously fucked.

My advisor, bless her “no babies before dissertations!” heart, has been nothing but absolutely supportive.  She’s a feminist theorist, so I had every right to expect this, but you never know what you’re going to get, especially since she told me DON’T GET PREGNANT after I got married.

Which is weird, come to think of it, because of everyone in our program getting married, I was the least likely to get pregnant.  What I mean is that I didn’t come across, I don’t think, like a family planner (which makes sense because the pregnancy wasn’t planned).  Of everyone around me having these big Christian t0-do weddings and buying houses and changing last names, I had a quick and dirty Unitarian ceremony followed by ice cream cake.  Kept my last name, as well as the apartment Wizard and I lived in before getting married.  I didn’t seem like the reproducing type, is what I’m sayin’.  But tell that to my left ovary.  (Did I mention that I know the pregnancy came from the ovary on the left?  It did.  Weird.)

Anyway, she wanted a chapter before the baby, and I didn’t produce (ha).  So I tried to get something together over the summer, but I failed.  She said this was fine because “it’s normal to need some time to get your bearings.”  But now that I’m back at work, she is laying down the law.  And she’s right.  I need rules.  I need someone to tell me DO IT NOW.  She has gladly played the role of hand-holder and hair-smoother for the past few months, but…I’m running down the clock.  And I can’t reasonably expect her to be patient and okay my slow slip into dissertation-abandonment.

I wish Godzilla  (that’s what he’s nicknamed for now.  You are welcome to suggest far-better alternatives) were more cooperative.  Yes, I know, he’s a BABY.  Cooperation is beyond his control.  But right now, for example, he is sitting on my lap, just barely keeping it together without my undivided attention (and even so, I have to stop every few seconds to re-engage him in a mirror game of “who’s the baby?”).  He won’t nap unless he’s on me, which for a while meant I was neutralized in the afternoon.  Just recently he’s started napping on me in a sling, which means I can work if I do so quietly and don’t move too much.  Ever since his cold he has refused to sleep in the crib for more than a few hours at a time, and after 2 am he’s done with the crib completely.  Wizard keeps insisting that we’ve gotten screwed in the Cosmic Baby Habits Lottery, that he is just far more difficult and time consuming than the average baby, but I know that’s not true because I read you guys (Hi, Accidents!) and know you’re soldiering through these messes, too.

But, yeah.  Won’t sleep in the crib.  Must nap on me.  Won’t spend more than 20 minutes entertaining himself (even though on a car trip he once entertained himself for TWO HOURS with a book about puppies.  Where the hell did that baby go?)  Hates to sleep and won’t settle down without lots of cuddles and walking about.  Oh, and I’m pretty sure he learned how to control his pee stream, because he squirts me, just a wee little bit, at every change.

Oh, and solids?  Damn, it takes a long time to feed these guys.

So go ahead and report me to protective services now, because I’ve basically listed out all the normal behaviors of infants and said they’re too much for me to handle.  But they wouldn’t be, if I didn’t have the whole “thinking thoughts and writing them down” thing going on.  I’d be fine if I could get two or three working hours in a row, but that’s not going to happen.  I was silly to think it would.

I’ve been whining a lot here, so it’s only right to follow up that behavior with a plea.  Are you a short-bursts writer?  Can you pump out a paragraph in 20 minutes or less?   That is, after being interrupted, can you pick up where you left off?  How do you do it?  I need writing strategies and would appreciate anything you’ve got.

WTF, WordPress?  I just wrote this whole post about my reasons for and against getting a Facebook account, inspired by this Slate article.  But now the post is gone!  Kerpoof!  I’m not rewriting that whole darned thing, so do me a favor, won’t you, and take my little poll?

Most blogs have a recurrent feature, like a weekly post on music or a book review. On my old blog I used to post photos, but since I’m working for anonymity here, I’ve got to forgo that one.  So I’m going to try out the “discussion post” trope, in part because it ironizes the quiet around here.

So.

I’m reading up on relativity for the diss.  Mr. Wizard is helpful here partly because he understands and can teach basic physics, and partly because he can vet the book pile, leaving me with things that I have some hope of understanding.  I’m not a bad feminist (i.e. “girls? they can’t do science!”), but I am cognizant of my personal limitations, one of which is an inability to grasp certain mathematical concepts.  Example: remember number lines, those cardboard numbered strips they gave you in first grade to help you understand addition and subtraction?  I never got the point of those.  I could do the math in my head, but when I tried to use the number line, I screwed it up.  I’ve got some obvious strengths, and I’ve got some obvious weaknesses. My dissertation topic demands that I dip into both pools of knowledge and skills, partly because I enjoy a good challenge.

This brings us to today’s topic for discussion.  Wizard hooked me up with an introductory book on relativity called Relativity for the Million by Martin Gardner, published in 1962.  Yes, it’s old, but the basics of the science haven’t changed much since then (so I’m told), this is an intro for general audiences (and so avoids the larger theoretical complications I can’t handle right now), and…there are pictures.  I started reading last night, and so far, so good.  But let me offer this quote from the intro for discussion:

I have resisted the temptation to add a final chapter on the philosophical consequences of relativity because I believe that, in the ordinary sense of the word ‘philosophical’, relativity has no consequences.  For the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science it obviously has implications…. But so far as the great traditional topics of philosophy are concerned–God, immortality, free will, good and evil, and so on–relativity has absolutely nothing to say.

Emphases above are mine, marking what represents for me a nearly unsayable assertion.  Partly because I am trained in postmodern theory, it would never occur to me to say that any theory has absolutely no consequences.  Now, I’m not arguing that scientific relativity leads to moral relativity or some such thing.  No no no.  I’m not so concerned with what those consequences would be as I am with the fact that someone (a clearly very competent someone) would assume there would be none.

Thoughts?  Discuss.

I’m giving myself 10 minutes to play around on the internet before going back to my reading.  In this short span of time, I offer a question to the group:

Um, what’s up with all the Christian bloggers on WordPress?

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  It’s just that I noticed most of my “tag surfer” tags (I surf on “dissertation,” “academia,” “feminism,” and a few other related topics) seem to point me to Christian-centered or Christian-influenced blogs.  You’ve got your Presbyterian feminists, your Lutheran academics, your Mormon dissertators…most of my tags bring me to people who are both ______ and Christian.  Or make that Christian and ______.

I don’t know if I’m just paying closer attention or if there really is a trend here, but I didn’t notice the same goings on at blogspot.  So if there is something going on here…a secret handshake, a “personal Savior” by-law in the terms of agreement…would somebody please fill me in?

ETA: Is it my blog title?  Is that what it is?  The “Our Lady” business?  Because I was going for kitsch there, nothing more…