"After becoming pregnant with their son, St. Clair and Musk’s relationship progressed.... In November, Musk responded to a selfie she texted him saying: 'I want to knock you up again.'"

"While she was pregnant, Musk had urged her to deliver the baby via caesarean section and told her he didn’t want the child to be circumcised. (Musk has posted on X that vaginal births limit brain size and that C-sections allow for larger brains.) St. Clair is Jewish and circumcisions are an important ritual in the religion, and she decided against a C-section. He told her she should have 10 babies, and they debated the child’s middle name.... She complied with the request to not name Musk on the birth certificate. Not long after the birth, [Musk’s longtime fixer, Jared] Birchall pushed St. Clair to sign documents keeping the father of the baby and details regarding her relationship with Musk secret in return for financial support. The offer was a one-time fee of $15 million for a home and living expenses, plus an additional $100,000 a month until the baby turned 21. Musk told her by text it was dangerous to reveal his relationship to the baby, describing himself as the '#2 after Trump for assassination.' He added that 'only the paranoid survive.' But she didn’t sign...."

From "The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers/The world’s richest man juggles more than a dozen children and ‘harem drama’ along with running his companies and advising Trump. He recently took a paternity test in a battle with one woman over money and privacy" (Wall Street Journal).

The life of a one-man genius sperm bank is not easy.

"If you cannot get married and start a family within three quarters, the company will terminate your labor contract...."

"Not responding to the call of the country, not marrying and having children, is disloyal."

Said the memo to unmarried employees of Shandong Shuntian Chemical Group, quoted in "Chinese Company to Single Workers: Get Married or Get Out/As China’s government worries about the falling birthrate, some private employers have ordered workers to do their part, or else" (NYT). 

The notice from the chemical company, which began circulating online last month, was directed at unmarried employees between the ages of 28 and 58, including divorced workers. As online ridicule grew, the company quickly backtracked. Reached by phone, a woman at its headquarters said the notice had been retracted, and that the local government had ordered the company to undergo “rectification.”...

Years ago, when the Chinese authorities wanted to limit births, they resorted to coercive measures like forced abortions and sterilizations. (The city where the chemical company is based, Linyi, was particularly notorious for such tactics.) Now that Beijing is trying to do the opposite, it is taking a softer approach, perhaps to avoid setting off large-scale resistance.

"... Miri Sakai, 24, a graduate student in sociology, testified that she had no interest in either sexual or romantic relationships or in having children."

"Although women have made some progress in the workplace in Japan, cultural expectations for their family duties are much as they have always been. 'The lifestyle of not getting married or having children is still rejected in society,' Ms. Sakai said. 'Is it natural to have children for the sake of the country?' she asked. 'Are women who do not give birth to children themselves unnecessary for society?'... Kazane Kajiya, 27, testified last week that her desire not to have children was 'a part of my innate values.' 'It is precisely because these feelings cannot be changed that I just want to live, easing as much of the discomfort and psychological distress I feel about my body as possible,' she said.... At one point, Ms. Kajiya, who is married, considered whether she was actually a transgender man. But she decided that she was 'totally fine with being a woman, and I love it. I just don’t like having the fertility that enables me to have babies with men.'"

From "In Japan, These Women Want to Opt Out of Motherhood More Easily/A lawsuit challenges the onerous requirements for getting sterilized, calling the regulations paternalistic and a violation of women’s constitutional rights" (NYT).

I wonder how common it is for a young woman to mistake her desire not to have a baby for transgenderism. Imagine going to the extreme of transitioning when all you really wanted was sterilization. 

"Evelyn, half-Native American and half-Black, with curly, sandy brown hair, felt internally broken as the weight of unmet expectations..."

"... and the fear of the unknown seemed to overtake her when she accidentally became pregnant. While Evelyn struggled academically, Whiteman had degrees, a community of friends, and a supportive, boisterous Grenadian family. But after struggling to find a Black sperm donor, she would stand in the entryway of the empty guest bedroom in her newly constructed home, praying and longing for a baby. Now Evelyn and Whiteman were bound together, by a child...."

From "After abortion attempts, two women now bound by child" (WaPo)(free-access link, so you can discern the abortion and racial politics for yourself).

Background: "America has a Black sperm donor shortage. Black women are paying the price. Black men account for fewer than 2 percent of sperm donors at cryobanks. Their vials are gone in minutes."

"Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory."

Wrote Chief Justice Tom Parker, in a concurring opinion, quoted in "Alabama Rules Frozen Embryos Are Children, Raising Questions About Fertility Care/The ruling raises worrisome legal issues for would-be parents far beyond Alabama whose hopes for children may depend on in vitro fertilization" (NYT).

It has become standard medical protocol during in vitro fertilization to extract as many eggs as possible from a woman, then to fertilize them to create embryos before freezing them. Generally, only one embryo is transferred at a time into the uterus in order to maximize the chances of successful implantation and a full-term pregnancy.

“But what if we can’t freeze them?” [asked the head of a group that represents the interests of infertility patients]. “Will we hold people criminally liable because you can’t freeze a ‘person’? This opens up so many questions.”...

I'm seeing the idea that the economics of the infertility treatment business have been radically transformed (at least in Alabama). 

"I consider despicable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs."

Said Pope Francis, quoted in "Francis Urges Ban on Surrogacy, Calling It 'Despicable'/The pope said that an unborn child must not be 'turned into an object of trafficking,' expanding his condemnation of a practice already illegal in Italy and some other European countries" (NYT).

Surrogacy is already illegal in Italy and compensated surrogacy is also illegal or restricted in much of Europe.... Surrogate mothers in the United States and Canada are often hired by Europeans, including same-sex couples, seeking to have children, though some American states have outlawed the practice. 

Francis, a constant critic of consumerism’s corrosive effects on humanity, is deeply wary that a profit motive will warp the traditional creation of life.... 

"No, it’s not ethical. It’s actually kinda repulsive. You’re treating kids like a commodity..."

"... and the mom like a vending machine. You don’t even know what it’s like to raise one kid, and you’re already optimizing the process to save money. This isn’t BOGOF. It’s a human being. Sheesh."

Says the top-rated comment on a letter to the NYT ethics adviser, in "Is It OK to Hire a Surrogate to Bear Twins? The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on the financial realities of family planning."

BOGOF = buy one get one free.

The advice seeker and his husband want 2 children, and the idea was to save money by contracting for twins. 

"Generally speaking, innovation is what weaker individuals do in order to overcome their relative disadvantage."

"From a scientific perspective, female primates have more to gain—and more to lose. Most are smaller and more vulnerable than the males. Given that their bodies are the ones that have to build, birth, and nurse children, females also have more urgent food and safety needs than males. So if our female ancestors were also good problem solvers—as higher primates are—then it makes sense for them to have been inventors who adapted around their limitations.... Gynecology is absolutely essential for our species’ evolutionary fitness.... To invent gynecology, protohumans needed to be able to trust one another enough to be around one another at those crucial moments of vulnerability: labor, birth, and early nursing. That’s why the arrival of midwives is one of those moments in hominin history for which we can truly say, 'This is when we started to become human.' It would have required a profoundly cooperative female society and a social structure that rewarded helpful behaviors...."

Writes Cat Bohannon, in "The Greatest Invention in the History of Humanity/The very reason we’ve managed to succeed as a species is gynecology" (The Atlantic). 

That article was adapted from Bohannon's book, "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution."

"Noting that forty-five per cent of British women cannot find the vagina on an unmarked diagram, while fifty-nine per cent of American women cannot find the uterus..."

"... a shocking fact that Nuttall blames in part on the hard-to-remember Latinate words—she laments the loss of terms such as 'wings,' 'gates,' and 'ports' that once described female anatomy. She dislikes 'period' as a word for menstruation: much better is 'the fluidity' of the long-lost 'overflownis.' In place of the Latinate 'deliver,' which to Nuttall sounds 'as if the baby’s just handed to us out of the tinfoiled crib of a takeaway food courier,' she suggests the sturdy Middle English of 'barnish' or 'bearn.' As a word campaigner, Nuttall is blithely decisive when it doesn’t matter, and cagey when it does. She is happy to advocate for words that have no chance of taking off, or to judge a word for a history that is no longer expressed in its meaning. But on subjects that she has identified as politically contentious—exactly where etymological expertise, wisely or not, is most sought—she is anxiously neutral. 'Queer,' she writes, has been reclaimed 'by some'; 'for others,' it 'remains an irredeemable slur.' Phrases like 'pregnant people' and 'people with a uterus' are 'for some,' helpful, precise, and inclusive; 'for others,' this language 'obscures social reality' or is 'dehumanising.'... 'Taking into account patriarchy’s habit of urging women to be quiet and of caricaturing those women who do speak up or out as gossipy, frivolous, hysterical, dull or bitchy, it seems regressive to stifle women’s words, however progressive the motivation. Each woman must have the terms of her own choosing.'"

From "How Much Do Words Matter? A scholar of medieval literature believes that words used in the past can empower women in the present" (The New Yorker), discussing the book "Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words," by Jenni Nuttall. My excerpt leans toward quoting Nuttall. The article itself is by S.C. Cornell, and this is this author's first New Yorker article.

The man's lament: "I want to comfort her within reason, and now she won't let me."

From "AITA for not taking my wife's possible [miscarriage] seriously?" (Reddit).

"I asked what can be done to ensure the respectful passing of our baby, and what could protect me from a deadly infection, now that my body was unprotected and vulnerable."

"They explained there was nothing they could do."

 
Said Amanda Zurawski at a press conference yesterday, quoted in "'Sick and Twisted': Women Describe Losing Pregnancies, Nearly Dying Because of Texas Laws Five women are suing Texas, asking the state to clarify what constitutes a 'medical emergency' under its abortion bans" (Rolling Stone).

"Even though medical experts expect their baby to survive only 20 minutes to a couple of hours, the Dorberts say their doctors told them that because of the new legislation...

"... they could not terminate the pregnancy.... 'The doctors already told me, no matter what, at 24 weeks or full term, the outcome for the baby is going to be the same.' Florida’s H.B. 5 — Reducing Fetal and Infant Mortality... bans abortion after 15 weeks with a couple of exceptions, including one that permits a later termination if 'two physicians certify in writing that, in reasonable medical judgment, the fetus has a fatal fetal abnormality' and has not reached viability. It is not clear how the Dorberts’ doctors applied the law in this situation. Their baby has a condition long considered lethal that is now the subject of clinical trials to assess a potential treatment. Neither Dorbert’s obstetrician nor the maternal fetal medicine specialist she consulted responded to multiple requests for comment...."

I'm reading "Her baby has a deadly diagnosis. Her Florida doctors refused an abortion. Florida abortion ban includes exception for fatal fetal abnormalities. But her doctors told her they could not act" (WaPo).

I wonder... are the doctors interested in getting the chance to figure out how to treat the condition, which is Potter syndrome?

Terry Bradshaw is trending on Twitter because, apparently, he repeatedly referred to the fatness of Andy Reid.

Terry Bradshaw’s intrusive thoughts on their way to tell him to call Andy Reid fat multiple times during the post game interview pic.twitter.com/NZXWy1VSbb

— 🥶❄️TheNotoriousNeer🏂☃️ (@Notorious_Neer) February 13, 2023

I selected that tweet in case you'd also — or rather — talk about the halftime show. What were those puffed-up dancers supposed to represent? Rihanna's pregnancy? The UFO/balloon? Snowmen? Polar teddy bears?

I only half-watched the halftime show. I'm sensitive to vicarious acrophobia — basophobia, really — and I thought the sound quality was so bad that that the music could only be "heard" by those who already had the music implanted in their head. 

What, exactly, was the worse thing Bradshaw said? I think it was — directly to Reid, after the game was won — "Big guy. Let me get the big guy in here. C'mon, waddle over here." 

IN THE COMMENTS: Jim puts it more graphically: "The puffed up dancers represented her spouse’s semen. She in her red outfit represented her ovum. This was clearly a biology lesson."

"[T]he 'Lebensborn' program — meaning wellspring or fountain of life... created in 1935... provided luxurious accommodations for unwed, pregnant women."

"Part of the program’s attraction was that unwed pregnant girls could give birth in secret. In 1939, about 58 percent of the mothers-to-be who applied to the program were unwed... by 1940, that number had swelled to 70 percent. Often, the homes were converted estates decorated by Himmler himself, using the highest quality loot confiscated from Jewish homes after their owners had been killed or sent to camps. Girls who were already pregnant or willing to be impregnated by SS officers had to prove their Aryan lineage going back three generations and pass inspections that included measuring the size of their heads and the length of their teeth. Once accepted, they were pampered by nurses and staff who served them delicacies at mealtimes and provided a recreational diet rich in Nazi propaganda...."

From "A new novel tells the story of Nazi birthing farms" by Kathleen Parker (WaP).

The new novel is "Cradles of the Reich" by Jennifer Coburn.

Here's the article in the Holocaust Encyclopedia about the Lebensborn program.

I found that as I was looking for photographs showing how a place "decorated by Himmler" would look. Here's a propaganda photograph with a caption that translated into "Everything for the healthy child":

 

 

From the Holocaust Encyclopedia article:

Here are 7 TikToks I've chosen to launch you into the long weekend. Let me know what you like best

 1. Alice in Wonderland and autism acceptance.

2. The crocheted pregnant doll.

3. Interior design for the solo woman.

4. Abbey (from "Love on the Spectrum") felt the allure of the SpaghettiOs can, but the actual SpaghettiOs are a different matter.

5. Now, what to wear to the beach?

6. Do celebrities like it when you impersonate them while standing right beside them?

7. Don't watch this one unless you have breasts and they are bothering you. Note: It's an ad! Some people love it. I'm seeing commenters who say it's the best ad they've ever seen.

"Some people in the US are rushing to get sterilized after the Roe v. Wade ruling."

That's the headline at CNN.

The evidence: "several gynecologists tell CNN they've seen an increase in people requesting tubal ligation." So... several gynecologists. Noted.

But there's an anecdote about a woman who's finding it difficult to get the surgery:

Rouge droplet?

I'm trying to read "Astronauts should not masturbate in zero gravity, NASA scientist says" (NY Post):

Astronauts have been warned against masturbating in space over fears female astronauts could get impregnated by stray fluids. There are strict guidelines over “alone-time” onboard in zero gravity. 

Scientists have warned even the slightest rouge droplet could cause chaos on board.

Rouge droplet? In space, is semen red? No, it's just the kind of typo spell-checkers don't catch, the funniest ones, the ones that are other words, like "rouge" for "rogue."

Conan O’Brien was interviewing a NASA engineer, who said, “Three female astronauts can be impregnated by the same man on the same session … it finds its way.” 

"I feel like women have to be more careful and more selective now in who they have intercourse with."

"If something happens with your birth control or your condom breaks, this potentially could be a partner stuck in your life forever because now you have to raise a child together."

Said Sarah Molina, 25, a "newly single" "event planner in Phoenix" who had been eager "to get back on the dating scene" until the overturning of Roe v. Wade "changed" her attitude toward sex, even though "abortion is currently legal in Arizona."

That's from "Sorry, Summer/We all know what happened with summer 2020. Then 2021 was dampened by Delta. This year, any anticipated return to revelry has been hampered by … *waves hands at everything.* Is there hope for enjoying the once fun season?" (NYT).

I read that article, then clicked a link at the bottom of that page, and it took me to this wedding story: "His Better Banter Won Her Over/Daniel Ogorzalek and Blair Dawson met in 2016 at the Brooklyn bar where she was working. He was drawn to her 'quick wit,' while she appreciated his 'incredible repartee.'" 

The last line of that, spoken by the bride, is: "At the end of the day, we both think life should be fun above all else. Laughter is an integral ever-presence and underscores every aspect of our relationship."

Fun above all else. Says a bride, binding her life to a partner forever. Once you have a partner who values fun above all else, you don't have to fret, like the "newly single" ladies, about sex leading to childbirth that could bind you forever to some random man, like back in the olden days. 

"The breeding kink—intense sexual attraction to the idea of getting pregnant, or getting someone else pregnant—is having a moment right now."

"A deluge of viral TikToks of users are professing their yearning to breed and be bred. A porn creator told Vice this week about a recent surge in demand for 'breeding' content. There is quite literally a WebMD article on breeding fetishism, not to mention an entire genre of horror movies and documentaries about unethical fertility doctors secretly fathering hundreds of kids. And the discovery of Elon Musk’s eighth and ninth (known) children on Wednesday led the richest man in the world to triumphantly tweet: 'Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,' and 'I hope you have big families and congrats to those who already do!'

I'm reading "Does Elon Musk Have a 'Breeding Kink?'/To ascertain whether or not Musk has a breeding fetish is to wade into territory that I'm not sure I have the stomach for—but I'm doing this for journalism" by Kylie Cheung (Jezebel).

Cheung answers her question:

"I was terrified of becoming pregnant. I was terrified of putting my life on hold for two-plus years. I don’t want to lose opportunities. I don’t want to be resentful."

Said the actress Jamie Chung — she's in "Dexter: New Blood" — quoted in "An actor’s use of a surrogate raises radical-feminist questions," a WaPo opinion piece by Alyssa Rosenberg. 

Chung, 39, acknowledged that people might assume she was “vain”... [S]urrogacy essentially offloads the discomforts and incapacities of pregnancy onto another woman. Yet there’s something galvanizing about hearing a woman bluntly rage against the limits of biology and the costs it imposes on half the population...