Anyway, otherwise very intelligent people such as Radley Balko go weirdly off the rails on this one. (Whom you should all read all the time, even though libertarians annoy you, because he is the only person in the history of blogging to ever get anybody off of death row by blogging about it. We arrange some excellent book events, and we make nice covers and John typesets’em all purty, but I’m pretty sure Radley’s got us beat ten ways to Sunday on useful blogging and we will never recoup, not with a thousand book events. Anyway he’s not the annoying kind of libertarian. Er, rather, he’s one of the least annoying kinds. He actually cares about the rights of poor people and has noticed that corporations as well as governments can infringe upon your rights, although he doesn’t focus upon this latter point as much as a left-libertarian would. Did I mention he saves people’s lives? His blog is rushing into burning buildings and dragging people out, and then it wants to go back in, and the chief’s trying to hold it back, because it’s inhaled all this smoke and all, but it busts free and saves three more children, but it just has three cute smudges of soot on its face, and then it kisses Natalie Portman. Then maybe it links to Ilya Somin, and you think, the hell he did?! Our blog is just drinking a cup of coffee, and making plans to kiss…Clive Owen? I may need to re-do the polling on this one.)

The other day Radley Balko pointed to a Reuters story which said, basically, that George Zimmerman fed his dog, and was an altar boy (no, but a real one), and loved his momma, and his Black neighbor would say on the record he had always been a sweet boy, what with his lawn-mowing, and waving, and suchlike. Radley seemed to think this showed…something new. “Turns out, the guy is a three-dimensional human being.” I protested, saying, who ever doubted Zimmerman was an actual person, in the round, who was kind to people sometimes? (Because everyone is, so I’m told. Hitler, dog, etc.) Radley responded: “I saw Tweets and blog posts from otherwise smart, calm people who immediately jumped to the conclusion that Zimmerman was a racist.”

Loves your mom, is altar boy, has a Black neighbor with whom you live harmoniously…all these things are compatible with being a racist! For damn sure they’re compatible with doing some racist shit, which may be more pertinent. I was inclined to pursue only the latter point, but what have we here? Oh, dag, Mr. Zimmerman, take it away down south, to Dixie:

I dont miss driving around scared to hit mexicans walkin on the side of the street, soft ass wanna be thugs messin with peoples cars when they aint around (what are you provin, that you can dent a car when no ones watchin) dont make you a man in my book. Workin 96 hours to get a decent pay check, gettin knifes pulled on you by every mexican you run into!

Aw, George, you didn’t have to miss none of that when you move from Manassas to Florida! You can just drive around scared to hit Cubans by the side of the road! Truth is, the demographics of the South are changing so much as an after-effect of construction jobs during the housing boom, there are plenty of Mexicans in Florida (plenty more when he wrote this, I imagine.) And of course there are always Black people. This tolls rather gloomily and out of spirit with the rest of the post all on a sudden. Ah, that’s because Mr. Zimmerman shot killed a Black teenager, isn’t it.

What was the other information provided in the Reuter’s story, which Radley’s commenter’s found so salient? There had been a bunch of serious, sometimes daylight burglaries committed in the storied “gated community” committed by Black men. Yeah, and you know what percentage of the county is Black? 32 goddamn percent. 32%! How is this not evidence that Zimmerman thought Martin was one of the people breaking into the houses, maybe just casing the joints, got out of his truck to follow him, wanted to detain him till the cops got there (which is called false imprisonment, everybody), pulled the gun to keep Trayvon from walking away, and then…? Something bad happened.

I’m sorry, but Zimmerman strikes me as a) racist, b) so dumb he could throw himself down on the ground and miss. His defense team is going to earn every penny they get paid by a huge donation fund of racists conservative citizens concerned that he might not see justice due to Obama and Eric Holder and the New Black Panthers and Acorn and Akon and that one chick who tried to make us use only lower case letters, and L’il Wayne, and the Rev. Al Sharpton and Flo Rida, because damn that is played out; why are people still going for that? My money’s always been on Zimmerman’s escalating and then just fatally screwing up. And on his being racist. His grandmoms worked as a babysitter for two black girls that ate with the family when he was little. Did they inoculate him against racism when they passed the rice? No. Would he have followed and shot a white 17-year-old who tried to force him to taste the rainbow? No. Do I believe his self-serving story about getting lost in his own 2-street subdivision (OK, maybe that part, actually) and then getting jumped on and getting the beatdown from Trayvon, with the ninja skills he learned at Menacing Black Youths Summer Academy? No Sir, no, no and no Ma’am. R-a-c-i-s-t.

UPDATE: I should really scan some of the yam crate labels, but I should really really stop looking at the evil, makes me have to lie down watching the blood beat in the capillaries of the back of my eye computer. Anyway they’re framed. Some aren’t super racist. Like the Black guy throwing dice and it says “Don’t Cry” Louisiana Commercial Sweet Potatoes Packed By Irvin Wimberly, Church Point LA. (But we all know Irvin Wimberly never packed a single motherloving sweet potato in his damn life. He might not of touched a sweet potato. Could be he was toiling away in the sweet potato fields, infected, like Levin, with the general quickening of energy in the sweet potato packers. Could be.) Here the man just looks sad because he (and we) can tell the dice are about to turn on him viciously. The most racist one is “King” Brand Porto Rican Yams; the king is a kind of idiotic-looking 10-year-old with a plush crown whose lips are printed too big. Now, because his skin is printed dark this isn’t immediately apparent; he’s not Sambo. But once you look it it, boy howdy.

Proof that my daughter learned better than I taught her: she said “those are racist.” I said: “documenting history of racism blah blah.” She, fixing me with withering scorn (she’s only just 9 at this point) “Mom, if an African-American family were coming over for dinner, would you take them down?” I was defeated. 1930s yam crate-labels: racist.

She knew Nigerian people had been at our old place when I had them up. African-American, see, that was the kicker, though in her opinion I should have never have hung them up. (They look so cute in the kitchen!) Belle Waring, hanging racist 1930s yam crate-labels all up in everywhere: doing something racist. I was willing to amend. They’re all just moping behind the toaster now. I don’t know what to do with them, honestly. Maybe give them back to the lady who collects them, but in the beautiful frames.

I consider myself something of an expert on the subject of broken noses. Mine first got straight-up broken in a random mugging by a 5’10’-6 ft tall black guy in a black hoodie and jeans. Actually, for real, not lying here. (Needless to say I didn’t bother to report it to the police. I seriously couldn’t have picked him up out of a line-up, and what, I want them to wander along Amsterdam Ave looking for 6 ft tall black guys in hoodies to hassle? What’s the point there? This was a long time ago, at the peak of NYC crime in the early 90s) Not really a mugging because they didn’t end up taking my stuff, more like a freak-out because I was walking too close to him or something and he was high. Whatever. Since then it has been broken numerous times, but because the initial break weakened it, I think, in a number of the cases. I mean, that one time a guy just hit me in the face by accident, that was a plain old hard hit. (Really an accident, not “I’m being abused” an accident.) The later breakages definitely produced less blood/trauma; maybe Zimmerman is in Fight Club?

Anyway, when someone hits you in the face hard enough to break your nose, you look rather distinctly awful. You are pale*, with bruises starting under your eyes, and the place where the break happened is busted open, and there is blood all over the damn place. Coming from the wound on your face, pouring out of your nose: blood everywhere. Now, maybe there’s some other more manly way to get your nose broken I’m not aware of, and that’s just the ladyway of getting the lady-noses broken. Or I’ve been the victim of some particularly bad nose-breakings? That’s frankly not unlikely. In any case, annoying as the video is (the ABC news EXCLUSIVE banner overlays the interesting part of the image for 90% of the running time), it clearly shows a man who was cuffed (so I was wrong about his not being cuffed!), but did not just get the beatdown from Trayvon Luke Cage Martin. He doesn’t even look shook up enough; dude just shot and killed a kid! If I had done that by accident I would be in agony. So, dear readers, a) don’t believe everything you read, and, b) the Sanford police should really have arrested this asshole at the time and their decision looks worse and worse in retrospect.

N.B. in re: trolling. I myself am mildly pro-troll on principle. I would prefer that there was no one trolling. However, if someone has to troll, they should damn sure be doing it right. Piss everybody off at once. Suddenly advocate nuking Japan for no reason. That’s why, when confronted with the weak-ass “trolling” of…bjk? I can’t even remember; I was inclined to call in the big guns and say if someone’s going to derail my thread it’s going to be a high-quality troll like Bob McManus. I know, you’re all thinking “when the hell are you going to tire of his demands that other people’s blood flow in the streets and so on?” I don’t know. He’s strangely almost exactly like my dad along certain axes, so he’s got a gilt-edge pass from me. We all know he would never abuse that by…what? He just? Oh, well.

*Even very dark-skinned people can look ashen or sallow—fundamentally unwell. In white people this expresses as blanching to paper-white, but there are analogues for the majority of the world that is not white.

Only some things have happened since I wrote that post, and as it turns out, I’m homeschooling Pseudonymous Kid right now. Not technically: he’s on “home hospital,” which is what the state calls it when a kid is out of school long-term for medical reasons. The way this is supposed to work on paper is that all the kids’ textbooks come home with him and he works his way laboriously through the workbooks and questions at the end of each chapter, and someone from the district comes out for an hour each week to make sure he’s keeping up.

The way it’s actually working in practice is that I’m hiring various people to come out once or twice a week to coach him in math, science, and general learning stuff (like being able to take instruction, developing “study skills”, and so on) while spending hours each day doing online research about “gifted kids” and mental health and behavior problems and blah blah blah, as well as trying to make sure that we inch towards having a schedule where he/we do some math together, read books, write some stuff, and so on. One plan, for example, is that we’ll put together a “Portal / Half Life Encyclopedia,” because I’ve realized he has actually done quite a bit of research into the nuances and corners of those games and if I can get him to write it up and teach him how to do a web page about it he can (1) get some writing done; (2) get “credit” for Language Arts; (3) develop some transferable skills for when he goes back to school.

In other words, for the time being we are no longer in the public school system on a day-to-day basis. We still have a foot in the door, both because the law requires some kind of documented school attendance and because I am not yet ready to take sole responsibility for establishing myself as a “private school” and documenting everything he does so that we can demonstrate that he’s not just playing video games for several hours a day (even though that’s a lot of what he’s doing) when it comes time for him to go to high school or college. God knows I would like to get him back in one of the public schools next year, though probably not the one he was attending, because homeschooling him is pretty much taking over my life and I don’t want to even think about paying $10k or more a year for private school (although at the moment the tutors are costing us $250/week, so). But it is quite possible that we are going to end up doing one or the other, at least for the rest of middle school.

So, yeah: I’ve ended up in the obnoxious zone where I’m not practicing what I’ve been preaching for years.

It turns out that in PK’s case, a “good” middle school with 1500 kids in it meant:

• bullying issues that the school can’t keep on top of. With 1500 students and class sizes of 30-40, there is a lot of coded teasing and snide remarks (“what’s wrong with fish?” is one PK was subjected to—superficially not bullying at all, right? Except that it’s mocking him for frequently having smelly sardines in his lunch box and asking at one point, when someone was making fun of his lunch, “what’s wrong with fish?” You guys remember middle school). PK also overhears racist and sexist crap that isn’t directed at him. None of this is the kind of “bullying” that makes headlines. No one is getting beaten up or fearing for their safety. But it does create a pretty hostile atmosphere for a sensitive, idealistic kid.


• Pretty dull and unrelenting class- and homework. Worksheets every day. Not a lot of project-based or creative learning. Teachers who won’t “give credit” for completed homework if the kid doesn’t “show his work”—in other words, if he’s doing the math in his head, he gets a zero for the homework even though he’s done every problem. Which frustrates him no end (and me too). He’s in the GATE class, and of course, being a “good” school, the administration and teachers are inevitably concerned with test scores, so there’s an underlying anxiety about making sure that The Standards Are Covered—which means the kids write essays that follow the format: “In the story _, the character _ demonstrates the quality of _. She demonstrates this quality through three different exchanges…” Which yes, as a writing teacher, you want kids to get the idea of a thesis, supporting evidence, character analysis. Those are the state standards. But if you’re a kid who actually likes stories and is good at talking about and analyzing them, this is stultifying. (To be fair, this teacher really works hard to make the class more fun than that, but in the end, she has to teach The Standards.)

The combination means that PK has ended up with a pretty significant anxiety problem, a huge chip on his shoulder, and buckets and buckets of hostility towards the system, the school, and his fellow students. Without going into details, we finally made the decision not to send him back on the day that the cops and the Crisis Response Team showed up at the house and interviewed him for an hour. Which as you might imagine, did wonders for his anxiety and sense of trust.

It turns out that the system’s limits, in combination with the things it “requires”—Crisis Teams! Cops!—are not always what’s best for kids. Yes,  schools ought to Do Something when a kid is having the problems that PK has. Unfortunately, between what schools Can’t Do and what they’re Required To Do, Something isn’t necessarily the best thing, and might actually be a bad thing.

Ultimately, of course, there is no one right thing. People vary more than systems do. Hence, most kids and their parents learn to make accommodations: yeah, the homework is kinda dull, but just get it done; let’s pack peanut butter instead of sardines; let’s designate your kitty socks and brightly-colored pants as “play clothes” so that you aren’t wearing them to school, learn to “ignore” the bullies, learn not to care when you overhear someone yelling “hey Chinese!” at an Asian kid during lunch. (Or, as the school suggests, “he should tell an adult”—to which PK says, “I’d be constantly running to adults every five minutes, and most of the time I don’t even know the name of the kid doing the bullying.”)

But those are a lot of accommodations, you know. And PK isn’t the kind of kid who makes accommodations easily, and to be honest, he is the kind of kid who requires some accommodations from others: he’s argumentative, he’s got a temper, he can be impatient, he sometimes swears, he likes being “weird”. Some kids, like PK, can’t make all those accommodations without doing violence to their sense of self: sometimes the result is quiet and tragic, and sometimes—like with PK—it’s loud and demands attention.

Indeed, if PK were the quiet and tragic sort he would still be in school. But he’s not.

So I am developing a certain humility, let us say, on the question of what parents “should” do with their kids vis-a-vis public education. I still think that, as a nation, we ought to invest in the public system and work to improve it: give it the resources to deal with all kinds of kids, give teachers the prep time and small class sizes that would allow them to give more attention to the outliers, spend the money to build new schools when things get to the point where the kids don’t know each other’s names.
Because while we can (barely) afford $250/week to hire PK’s old math teacher, an acquaintance with a PhD in biology, and a professional “educational counselor” to come to the house and keep working with him; the health insurance to pay for therapy; and the luxury of a stay-home-mama with her own PhD to research school options, arrange for the tutors, take him to his appointments, and be home during the day so that the homeschooling option exists, most people don’t.

What we’re doing isn’t scalable, and it isn’t an acceptable solution to have a system that’s so standardized there’s not enough room on the margins for non-standard kids—not, at least, if you believe (as I do) that educating kids is an important collective concern and ought to be a national priority.

I don’t know the answer. I suspect there isn’t one, in the sense of a one-size-fits all solution.

“I’d just like to say that all the ladyblogging about ladyparts and ladyissues only of interest to ladies around here lately has been awesome. I’m learning a lot from it”;

I’m going to share some observations as I near the end of my third round of IVF.

Embryos are not babies
You might think someone so eager to have children as to undergo months of difficult and expensive treatment would have a hard-core view on embryos and babies. You’d be right.

Twice now, I’ve had two embryos placed in my uterus. I have pictures of the precise moment they were ‘put back’. None of them stuck. The fact is, most don’t.

Despite what we went through to create these embryos, I am left with the cold conviction that they were opening gambits, and no more. Certainly, I would have loved them if they’d turned into babies and mourned them if I’d lost them farther along, and I was very, very sad to not get pregnant. But I felt as if the embryos were simply sets of ultimately flawed operating instructions that de-compiled within hours or days. Most embryos are only that. They may succeed, or they may not. They may be carried to term, or they may not. Human agency may intervene in any of these moments, or it may not. This makes me a bad Catholic, but I find it strangely comforting nonetheless.

I believe more firmly now that an embryo is a step along the way to becoming a human, but it’s not a human. It’s a possibility. And a real, live human woman in all her flaws and situational complexity is infinitely more important and deserving of consideration than the mere possibility of one.

Trans-vaginal ultrasounds are really quite invasive
This is a live issue in the US, where legislators are trying to force women who want abortions to undergo ‘just an ultrasound’ to see their babies. The idea is that once women see the fetus, they won’t want to kill it. Religious conservatives can’t seem to conceive that a woman can understand her pregnancy is real and still choose to end it.

During IVF, women have frequent trans-vaginal ultrasounds to see how their ovarian follicles are developing and to measure the lining of the uterus. I have them two or three times a week. It was a big deal for me when I started as it’s basically a dildo with a camera in it, wrapped in a condom, smeared with very cold lubricant, pushing quite hard against the cervix. Towards the end of the cycle it’s quite painful. At any point along, it’s awkward. Even though I can now chat happily about the weather or point out a missed follicle on the screen, the nurse and doctor are still incredibly solicitous of my comfort. They do this scan every day but they appreciate it’s not a normal or comfortable situation for the person being scanned, and they act accordingly.

I want to have these scans. They are getting me somewhere I want to be, and they are administered by professionals I know and trust and who are on part of that journey with me. I believe this invasive scan being forced on pregnant women seeking an abortion would be a violation of their bodies. As someone who gets this scan all the time, I truly cannot imagine the interaction in the room or the doctor/radiographer – patient relationship that would be involved in a woman unwillingly undergoing it from a professional intent on forcing her into something she doesn’t want. I also wonder how there can possibly be consent, when the women are forced to submit in order to be allowed medical care.

Most people are statistically illiterate – probably by choice
The odds in my case are 70 – 80% for failure. That’s unfortunate but normal for my age. Most people I talk to are irrationally optimistic about their chances. The likelihood is expressed as; ‘We have a 20 – 30% chance of success? That’s great!’ And it is great, of course, compared to people a decade or two ago whose chance of having a baby was precisely zero. But if a doctor said you had a 70-80% of dying in the next six months, wouldn’t you start writing your will and marking off that bucket list? The numbers are not kind, but I find it helps to be honest with myself about the glass being less than a quarter full.

Then there’s the Monte Carlo fallacy, which you hear often in IVF circles; ‘I have a one in three chance of getting pregnant each cycle, so if I do three cycles, I’m bound to get lucky’. Again, wishful thinking. Each cycle re-sets the likelihood back to a third. I don’t like to imagine how many cycles I would have to do before my numbers revert to the mean!

There is really very little you can do
It’s good that some women find cutting out alcohol and coffee helps, or doing post-embryo transfer meditation, having acupuncture, giving up work, or any number of things that make them feel better from one minute to the next. (Giving up coffee may possibly help with implantation, but the improvement is vanishingly small.) But none of these things improves outcomes as much as not being fat, not being old, not being poor, living in the right local authority area, picking the right clinic, or, sometimes, just using a different drug or protocol.

Women receive an endless stream of unsolicited advice – largely from other women – that amounts to an implicit and unintentional blaming when assisted conception doesn’t work. It pains me to be ungracious about help so generously offered, but I’ve read too many discussion threads of women torturing themselves for not lying down for long enough afterwards, for drinking that cup of black tea or not making it to yoga, that one time. Or the worst; not relaxing!!

There is only one thing a woman on IVF can do to improve her chances of getting pregnant: be born with a lot of good quality eggs and don’t spit them out too soon. Massages and detox diets have zero effect on the ovarian reserve. Zero. It is hard to accept, but the level of agency involved once you’ve surrendered to IVF is almost nil. Take your shots at the right time, and get enough food and sleep. That’s it.

As a feminist, I believe that irrationally constraining my lifestyle in ways that don’t demonstrably help, just so I can say ‘I did everything I could’, is just another way of staying small and quiet so no one can blame me if, as the numbers so cruelly indicate, it doesn’t work out.

So yes, do all the scented candles, evening primrose oil, positive thinking and lovely long walks you like. They help with peace of mind and overall wellbeing, and can be essential to just getting through it. But they won’t demonstrably help to start a pregnancy, and not doing them doesn’t mean you didn’t want it enough.

IVF clinics (in the UK) are choke points for everyone’s pet public health priority
If I were amongst the lucky majority who fall pregnant by simply having sex, I wouldn’t have to submit to endless checklists imposed by well-meaning public health busy-bodies. But I am not allowed to proceed unless my smear is up to date, my vaccinations can be proven, and I undertake to swallow extra folic acid daily. There are lots more I can’t remember, and they all involve providing the clinic with paperwork in case there’s an inspection. Some of these requirements have to do with pregnancy, but many are simply unrelated trip-switches that shut off IVF to anyone who doesn’t comply.

It’s classic bureaucratic irrationality. Almost anyone can get pregnant without permission, but once you fall into the trap of needing help, you must prove again and again that you are worthy of it.

Practically, it doesn’t make sense. The IVF demographic is a small one, but, I’ll hazard, on the whole a lot healthier than the general child-bearing populace. Chances are you’ve tried a lot of lifestyle improvements before you start on the Gonal-F. So why should I have to satisfy expensive and time-consuming box-ticking exercises to get permission for motherhood?

But the current hot button issue in the UK is single embryo transfers. There’s no possibility of an Octomom scenario in Britain. Doctors here can only transfer one embryo at a time unless there’s a good reason to transfer two, such as the woman being older than thirty seven. Three embryos can be transferred to women in their forties, but this is rare. When two embryos are transferred, the likelihood of a twin pregnancy can be up to 25%. (That’s 25% of the successful 10 – 20% of transfers in the >37 age group.) But the UK fertility regulator, the HFEA, has just told fertility clinics they must bring multiple birth rates down even further, to 10%.This means more pressure on women or couples to transfer a single embryo, no matter what their situation is. If they don’t, they are selfishly risking multiple births and burdening the system.

Like most public discussion of IVF, there is a lot of cant that tries to disguise the unpalatable truth. Hardly anyone wants to carry twins, but we only have a couple of shots at getting pregnant, so the risk/reward calculus is different to that of most people. To support its directive, the HFEA insists that single embryo transfers result only in slightly lower pregnancy rates. But this is only part of the story. (And given what women are already told to do to only marginally increase their success rates, it is striking that the same differentials can be completely dismissed when it suits.)

If you don’t transfer the second embryo, you have to freeze it. When you freeze it, the odds of successfully thawing it drop to around 60%, depending on the facility. So by insisting on freezing the second embryo instead of giving it a chance in utero, the authorities are effectively destroying anywhere between a quarter and a half of them.

This issue tends to be misrepresented as ‘Well, it’s difficult for clinics to say no to pushy couples who are paying for a service / only get one or two cycles on the NHS’. The truth is that individuals opting for double embryo transfers have gone through a lot to create a small number of embryos, and are making sensible decisions based on the full range of relevant information, not just the statistics that serve the HFEA’s case.

What’s at issue is the relative risk calculus of the individual couple versus that of a national health provider, but with the added dimension of time. We are comparing the risk of failure today versus risk down the road with multiple births. Most people get about a two-year window to succeed or fail with IVF. Improving thawing rates of embryos or pre-implantation identification of successful ones are, for anyone undergoing IVF today, merely interesting hypotheticals. Our timeline is by necessity shorter than that of the regulator, and none the less compelling for that.

In short, these are complex and difficult questions that deserve an honest debate based on the full range of available information, and not the patronizing partial truths coming out of the HFEA.

Blaming IVF multiple births for hoovering up scarce public health resources may or not be fair, but it’s probably inaccurate. NICUs are not full of IVF multiples. The NICU population comes from a range of groups, including babies with genetic disorders and the premature children of very young mothers with chaotic lives who would never pass the bureaucratic scrutiny required to darken the door of an IVF clinic. I don’t believe the state has a right to prevent these women conceiving, so why should it be allowed to stop me?

Everyone has a story
Many, many people have had tricky or unhappy times, not just with infertility, but with miscarriage, and the moment you hint you might be one of them, stories just come tumbling out. Infertility is a great leveler, and another lens through which to see that the reality of life is unpredictable, painful but also richer than the happily ever after I would have chosen for myself.

But ‘everyone has a story’ works in another way, too. If many media commentators are to be believed, IVF is a quick fix for sharp-elbowed women who ‘want it all’ but ‘left it too late’ and, let’s be honest, were probably ‘asking for it’. This doesn’t happen to be my story, but I don’t generally volunteer that because a) it’s nobody’s business, and b) if it was my story, would I be somehow deserve this? And would my husband?

It’s horribly commercialized, but if it wasn’t we wouldn’t have it
There is a whole medical/commercial infrastructure that seems to determine that no matter what the cause of infertility, IVF is nearly always the answer. This makes sense for many patients, but the incentive structures for large-scale provision of just one type of treatment may crowd out others.

However, as pretty run of the mill, middle class people living in a provincial city, we would not be able to access IVF without the scaling made possible by the financial rewards of a somewhat industrialised process. So I’m fairly sanguine about becoming grist to the mill of the fertility industrial complex. And, as I hope I’ve indicated, my clinic and the people who work in it are lovely and very, very good at their jobs.

IVF is not all that bad
I won’t generalize my own, relatively easy, experience to those of all women undergoing IVF. But I will share that, even with the bone-tired exhaustion, endless appointments, and recovery from minor surgery every couple of months, I’ve found it all surprisingly ok. It’s human nature that we probably don’t hear as much about the many IVF experiences that are really quite tolerable. But for everyone, IVF is also an emotional rollercoaster, albeit one which defies the laws of gravity with a lot more downs than ups.

IVF is a lot of things. It’s highly political, as I’ve tried to illustrate. It’s unpleasant, tiring and time-consuming. It’s bloody expensive. In all these respects, it’s perhaps not bad practice for the down-sides of parenthood. It’s also a timely counter to the downward supply curve of adoption.

But if I had to sum up all I’ve learnt, particularly for those considering it, I’d say ‘It’s actually not all that bad, considering. And at least it gives us a chance.’

***

A word to the wise, I’ve edited out my thoughts on adoption in the UK, but suffice to say it is difficult, if not impossible, for people in my situation to adopt, and I will zap any comments along the lines of ‘There are loads of needy children out there. Why don’t you just get one?’

***
P.P.S. My belated thanks to the many commenters below for such a generous and informative discussion.

That wasn’t totally unreasonable because they are less effective for women who have never given birth vaginally, being more likely to be expelled. I think there was also a misguided consensus that you couldn’t dilate a woman’s cervix enough to insert the device unless she had previously given birth. Today, as I understand it, manufacturers produce a smaller size to solve this problem.

I was on the pill for about 10 years. I always had trouble with it, experiencing breakthrough bleeding (basically you get your period twice a month, no thank you) and other various side effects including, in my opinion, exacerbation of depression. I got switched around to more types than I can remember in an attempt to find one that was acceptable.

Here’s what’s great about the copper IUD: no hormones! The copper makes your womb inhospitable to a fertilized egg, for reasons that I think are still somewhat unknown. So, maybe an egg is fertilized, but it can’t attach itself and begin appropriating resources to build a placenta. I’m not sure whether this counts as baby-killing to the anti-abortion crowd; probably yes, even though the definition of getting pregnant involves a fertilized egg implanting itself in your uterus. Not just, you know, hanging around briefly. (Do these people really think when they go to heaven they will be vastly outnumbered by the souls of fertilized eggs who failed to implant and were washed away during menses? That’s going to be some boring conversation right there. Will those little dudes be casting down their teeny, tiny golden crowns around the glassy sea? I call bullshit; I don’t think anti-abortion people believe that at all.)

Insertion of the device does hurt. It only takes a few seconds, though, and then you don’t have to do anything about it for several years. The main reason women have the device removed it that it causes heavier bleeding during their period. My experience was that this was (dramatically!) true at first, but that my body then adjusted.

Obviously the IUD does nothing to protect you from STDs. But it’s not competing with condoms in this area, it’s competing with the pill. Pregnancy rates are lower when using IUDs than when being on the pill, probably because it’s very difficult to be a perfect pill user. Guys may think it sounds easy: you take one a day, end of story. But sometimes you forget if you’ve taken it or not; actions repeated so frequently have a tendency to blur together. Or you end up staying out super-late and crashing at your friend’s place. In theory you’re meant to add condoms to the mix at that point until you start taking a new set, but in real life people often don’t bother. Part of the appeal of the IUD is that you don’t have to do anything.

My only jealousy now is of the new pills where you only get your period 4 times a year. That would be great! Let’s face it: getting your period is a pain. There’s blood everywhere! Who needs it? It’s true that it can be the most welcome sight in all the world, when you have been sitting there thinking you might be pregnant, and wondering what the hell to do about it. And suddenly these is a cadmium red solution to all your problems. Otherwise: lame. So, ladies, IUDs are great and you should consider them.

UPDATES: One commenter notes that although we don’t know how the IUD works, it seems to work primarily by inhibiting fertilization, and only secondarily by preventing implantation. So we all win, including the little dudes with the tiny crowns. Another commenter who survived a pregnancy while his/her mother was using an IUD wants me to point out that this is a possibility, and that grave birth defects can result. This is true, and something my doctor mentioned to me. The failure rate is incredibly low, but if the IUD does fail the consequences can be very serious for the developing fetus (if not fatal before the fetus is viable outside the womb, which is more likely).

One thing one might wish to consider is what the actual economic/social conditions were like back in the Environment of Early Adaptation? Well, the real answer is that we have no idea, but a not totally implausible answer is that the most similar existing societies are those who live in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung, and (apparently) less ¡exciting! tribes in the Amazon. In such tribes everyone has notably more leisure time than in agricultural societies, though of course their reproduction rate is much, much lower.

Generally, the gathering (mostly done by women) provides 80% of the average adults’ calories and the hunting (mostly done by men) 20%. That’s on average, and the protein is obviously important, so… Now, being the all-that best hunter in the tribe can convince lots of laydeez to have sex with you. Is this because they want your resources? No, because every motherfucking-body shares the food, Holmes. Shares the motherfucking food. They don’t want your resources—-though they probably wouldn’t say no to you getting the oysters off that roast wild turkey for them. They want your hot body. Why are you so good at hunting? You’re in the pink. A fine physical specimen, keen of eye, etc.

Now, if you, hypothetical armchair evolutionary psychologist, are very, very good, I might allow you to construct a loooong chain of argument by analogy, in which being the best hunter=social capital, and monetary capital today=social capital. Note, however, that you will be forced to leave out all the bits about “providing” for the offspring and so forth, and be left with something more along the lines of birds that do stupid dances to garner sexual attention, and the great engines of modern capital will turn out to be the baroque construction of a thousand bower-birds working at cross-purposes. Which, granted, not totally implausible.

“No but food’s important,” I hear armchair evolutionary psychologist cry. Yes. Food. Totes important. We’re all together on this one. So maybe fucking the best hunter does get you (as female hunter-gatherer) a bit of extra food. (Note that everyone’s far from starving or they could just put in a little more time looking for food, which they do not, because they’d rather hang around poking the fire with a sharp stick or creating oral epics.) Then maybe you’d want the best hunter to think your kid was his so your kid would get extra food too. But life is short, and being the best hunter doesn’t last forever, maybe you better fuck that likely young up-and-comer with the blue feather in his hair. And then again, truth be told, strength isn’t everything, and that guy who used to be the best hunter a few years back knows a trick or two, if things were to get rough, might be useful. You know what you should really do here? Fuck every last member of the tribe who isn’t your dad or your brother, and convince each and every one of them that he is your special little schnookie-boo, and separately at various times of the day give each of them a blushing, downcast look which indicates he is the still point of your turning world.

And that explains why women are all total sluts to this very day, and why people who think that the veldt predisposes women to sleep with old men who have lots of money appear to have forgotten about the perishability of food items, and the non-utility/replaceability of almost all other items, and the fact that there was no money then. The End.

P.S. My husband came up with the “ad hominid” formulation and deserves full credit.

And oh yes, in March Lucy the Dog died after thirteen and a half years of faithfully guarding the house, playing with Nick, tending to Janet whenever she had migraines, and talking to Jamie when no one else would understand him.

But there was one good thing about 2011, and it was a world-historical event.  I refer, of course, to our family’s decision to topple Qaddafi and plunder Libya a milestone we had been anticipating for approximately twenty years:

And they pronounced his name correctly!

At least since 1994 I have promised Jamie I would cry at this event.  At least since 2003 he has responded to this promise with great exasperation and annoyance (“Michael! You will not cry”).  And in the end, he was right—I did not cry, largely because it was all I could do to operate the zoom at maximum zoom-power and keep my focus on the right kid.

The year is almost behind us.  Jamie has completed his first semester at LifeLink PSU, in which he took courses in meteorology, dinosaurs, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  He also declared himself the Assistant Director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, on the grounds that he does in fact assist me.  Everyone in the immediate household is well, and my father is improving.  As of six weeks ago we have a new dog, a rescued six-year-old Jack Russell/beagle mix.  So, dear readers, here’s hoping your 2012 is much better than your 2011, wherever and whoever you may be.

In the meantime, for god’s sake tip well and if you’re not paying the person who cleans your house or mows your lawn or delivers your newspaper or nannies your kids two weeks bonus wages at some point during the year (it doesn’t have to be during the Big Spending Season, but everyone is entitled to a vacation, and don’t give me this crap about how they’re “self-employed” and it’s “their responsibility” to budget for their own vacation), you suck.*

*Possibly not if you live in a country in which people who do this kind of work actually get the same benefits and protections as so-called “professionals.”

For the first time ever, the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the Food and Drug Administration, refusing Wednesday to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. The decision avoided what could have been a bruising political battle over parental control and contraception during a presidential election season.

Thanks a lot, Kathleen Sebelius. God knows we wouldn’t want one of the groups least likely to use contraceptives properly to be able to easily get their hands on some Plan B. Up next: banning over-the-counter sales of paracetemol. Ha.

Belated Update: Reading below I do see that excerpt is misleading if you haven’t read the whole article; they didn’t take Plan B away from existing over-the-counter-sales, they just refused to extend it to full OTC status which would extend to those 17 and younger.

Not much else has changed; the vegetable section is either bulging with unlikely and out of season produce or empty like in a zombie movie or communist Russia. The price war turns out to be just lower prices than in August when they were hiked up ahead of time. And there are a couple more self-checkouts barking orders and requiring on average two staff interventions to make each transaction go through.

But the Costa. That’s changed everything.

This is a suburb of Edinburgh about a mile from the nearer villages and with a mix of public and private housing. It’s by no means isolated, but on a wet and blustery day twenty minutes walk feels too far for a pint of milk or the morning paper. I can’t imagine I’d do it more than once a week if I had a buggy to push or arthritis, no matter how lonely or fed up I was. And when you work from home, a burst of fresh air and a face to face conversation with a real, live human is a godsend.

Now, one of my daily highlights is my overpriced, under-caffeinated and much loved light latte sipped at a plastic table under piped music drowned out by the endless cheeping of supermarket scanners. A mix of the same people is there most days.

One is an elderly woman bent over a stick who waits discreetly at her table while the counter staff bring over her tea and biscuits. Another is any one of the buggy-pushing set enjoying a guilt-free sit down before getting on with the shop. My favourite is the older woman I always have to repeat my order to but who always seems uncommonly pleased to be there.

I suppose the point is that however annoying the perpetual encroachment of large corporates and their vertical integrations and tie-in deals, the day to day of mega-commerce can still boil down to people in a community using the place to find, talk to or just quietly appreciate each other.

‘Concerned the female unemployment rate is higher and getting worse’;

‘Troubled that axing child benefit nudges middle class women out of work for good’;

‘Alarmed that women know health and education cuts doom their children to shorter, poorer lives’;

‘Horrified that targeted cutbacks to legal aid mean demonstrably more women will be murdered by the men they love’.

Not at all.

Silly women, the government thinks! Just because of our blue-sky thinking to cut parental leave in the never-ending War on Red Tape, why would women think we have it in for them?

But the UK equivalent of the American soccer mom is deserting the coalition government in droves, and she must be won back. How? The coalition can’t miss this once-in-a-generation chance to destroy the welfare state in order to pay for banks and the imaginary economy they’ve destroyed. The cuts must go on.

Then what shall they do to win women back? How about some cheep ‘n cheerful eye-catching measures that show our hearts are in the right place? Let’s;

• Ban forced marriages, because that’s too simple an issue to cock up
• Pretend we can stop porn on the Internet, because women are too stupid to know it doesn’t work like that, and we can still get ours anyway
• Talk very loudly about how hideous it is to sexualize children, especially working class ones who don’t know any better
• Spend bazillions on our buddies’ flagship ‘free schools’ in west London to show we really care about the kids
• Remind everyone constantly that the Prime Minister’s heart is in the right place; he has NHS frequent flyer miles and he feels our pain

And you know what? Cameron is right to be a little perplexed that women are losing faith in him. Because the government’s faux-regretful gouges at the post-war social contract don’t just hurt women. They hurt everyone who’s not been sensible enough to be born or become wealthy. It’s just that women voters seem to be among the first to cop on to it.

But you can’t play the ‘trust me because I’m a reasonable, personable man with a clever wife I adore’ card more than once. Women aren’t stupid, and neither is the electorate.

For those who don’t know, Tyler’s novels, nearly all set in Baltimore, are mostly quiet dramas of family life and relationships. The wider world of politics and economics doesn’t intrude much, so we’re a long way from the grand themes of Jonathan Franzen and the like. Many of the books are somewhat similar, in that a person has their habits and their conception of who they are turned upside down by an encounter with someone utterly unlike themselves. Sometimes they are changed; sometimes they revert. Her male characters are often stiff, calculating and habit bound; women more open and spontaneous, but she manages to achieve a sympathetic engagement with all of them. And all of her families conform to the Tolstoyan cliché. Her writing is also extraordinary. Highly economic and unfussy and yet she has an ear to capture a scene or a moment in a phrase that sticks in the memory – “By now he was looking seriously undermedicated” from A Patchwork Planet, for example.

The novels are about you, and me and our relationships and difficulties with spouses, parents, children, in-laws and colleagues. Since I became enthusiastic about Tyler, I’ve given some of her books as presents and then been asked if I was “making a point” about the recipient’s relationship. Well no I wasn’t, but I take this as good evidence that Tyler sees and captures the universal in all of our peculiar cases. I mentioned Tyler to a bookblogger friend, Kate, recently, and she asked me which are the best. I’m hard pushed to say. The Tin Can Tree was a bit of a struggle and some of the others disclosed themselves slowly but turned out to be among the best. Perhaps Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant would be a good place to start.