Tearing Down the Maternal Wall

Introducing Rachel Lu

It's "Featured Authors February," and today we announce our newest Featured Author: Rachel Lu.

Rachel Lu is a writer and editor who works for Law & Liberty and contributes regularly to America magazine, National Review, and other publications. She has a PhD in philosophy from Cornell University, and writes about politics, culture, gender, Catholicism, and political conservatism. Rachel has previously written for us as part of our symposium on Feminism Against Progress, and we've featured several of her pieces in our curated round-ups.

Here's what she has to say about feminism today:

This week's FD Original is Rachel's first piece as a Featured Author: "Tearing Down the Maternal Wall."

Fairer Disputations
 

Tearing Down the Maternal Wall

RACHEL LU

The paradigm for the Mommy Wars came out of the seventies, when Phyllis Schlafly and the second-wave feminists squared off over the Equal Rights Amendment. Eventually, the fighting petered out, but not because a ceasefire was ever negotiated between the professionals and the housewives. Instead, what really happened was that the world of work became incredibly confusing. Who can keep up with the changes? What even counts as working anymore? Even if we wanted to be judgey, it’s hard to keep track of everyone’s varied experiments with part-time jobs, at-home jobs, Etsy shops, or gig work. The mothers I know are filling all sorts of roles in virtual or community organizations, and it’s often unclear who is paid and who is a volunteer. Why ask?

Instead of fighting their own civil war, modern mothers have moved to the cutting edge of another social transformation. We’re making the most of a growing range of alternatives to traditional jobs, helping support our families even as we prove to fellow Americans how much we are capable of doing.

Around the Web

Love was in the air this week! But over at The Atlantic, Brad Wilcox argues that elites don't practice what they preach when it comes to love—and especially marriage.

The Atlantic
 

The Awfulness of Elite Hypocrisy on Marriage

BRAD WILCOX

College-educated elites have outsize power over American culture and politics, and on matters of family, they are abdicating it. They typically don’t preach what they practice, despite the megaphones they hold in traditional and social media, and elsewhere. Sometimes they preach the opposite, celebrating practices they privately shun. More often, they are simply silent and do very little politically or culturally to strengthen the foundations of marriage for Americans outside of their own privileged circles.

As a nation, we have not been shy, historically, about advocating for certain behaviors that typically lead to better lives for individuals and fewer problems for society. Targeted educational campaigns—in schools and the culture—have brought down the rates of teen pregnancy and cigarette smoking, for instance. But when it comes to marriage before children, or the success sequence more broadly, nothing comparable has been done at a national scale.

At UnHerd, Sallie Baxendale takes a nuanced view of the science of puberty blockers. Her own study sought to summarize peer-reviewed research, yet it was rejected by peer reviewers for shedding light on the less-than-favorable findings.

And at Return, Featured Author Katherine Dee writes on good parenting and "transitioning."

UnHerd
 

Why Did Three Journals Reject My Puberty-Blocker Study?

SALLIE BAXENDALE

Yet “safe and fully reversible” can never be the default position for any medical intervention, never mind a treatment that is now deemed experimental by authorities in Europe and the UK. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and the only extraordinary evidence here is the gaping chasm of knowledge, or even apparent curiosity, of the clinicians who continue to chant “safe and completely reversible” as they prescribe these medications to the children in their care. It is not the job of a scientific paper to “bring people into the fold”; it is the job of clinicians to understand the evidence base of the treatments they offer and communicate this to the patients they are treating.

Finally, Evie Solheim writes about the many women in America who have opted for home births—some with state certified midwives, but many without.

The American Conservative
 

The Women Having Babies Underground

EVIE SOLHEIM

While many states, including California and Texas, are friendly to home birth, other states are less so, leading some pregnant women to seek care from underground midwives. It’s unclear how many of 2020’s home births were attended by underground midwives, because the families that use them usually mark births as “unattended” on vital records. What is clear is the need for the few remaining states that ban CPMs to consider whether their laws reflect how women in these states are actually giving birth. Women are hungry for home birth, and when some of them face hurdles to a legal home birth, they opt not for a hospital or birth center but for “free birth,” forgoing the midwifery model and giving birth at home unassisted. 

Events:

Today at 4:30 Eastern, the Abigail Adams Institute hosts Featured Author Leah Libresco Sargeant and Monica Klem discussing "Pro-Life Feminism Then and Now: Women's Advocacy for the Vulnerable from the 19th Century to Today." All are welcome.

And the MIT Free Speech Alliance invites you to see two teams debate the proposition "Resolved: that sex is biological and binary and gender identity is no substitute for sex in social policy." Featured Author Holly Lawford-Smith will be one of the debaters on the affirmative team!

April 17, 2024 • MIT's Wong Auditorium • 7:00 pm Eastern

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