Daily Mail
September 18, 2009

"It's a modern dilemma: What do you do about the unsightly rolls of fat that spill over your waistband?

The answer, it appears, is the ‘muffin top chop’.

Growing numbers of women are paying around £5,000 to have the muffin top fat vacuumed out, leaving them with a bulge-free figure.

Patients tend to be young and middle-aged women anxious to free themselves of fat that has refused to budge despite diet and exercise.

Surgeon Patrick Mallucci, of London Plastic Surgery Associates, said: ‘We do not offer this as a quick-fix to weight loss.

These are fit, healthy people who have done everything they can to lose weight."

The Miami Herald
September 3, 2009

"Samantha Stone, 29, would like to have a baby soon. But with the job market tenuous, being pregnant in the workplace has become much more risky.

Just look at the number of pregnant women who are blogging about job discrimination, filing lawsuits for unfair removal and turning to advocacy groups for relief after being targeted in job cuts.

Claims of pregnancy discrimination are on the rise, maternity leaves are a luxury and conducting a job search while pregnant is like trying to win the lottery.

Even more, many pregnant women are shocked to learn they have few workplace protections. Women swept into the layoff frenzy are discovering you can be fired while pregnant or on maternity leave."

The New York Times
September 1, 2009

"In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.

Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.

Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a gal might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. After all, she can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. Unless forced to because some bounder has abandoned her, why would any sane woman choose another trot down the aisle — for another Rachael Ray spatula set? Spare me extra candlesticks, I’m a one-trick monogamist."

The Wall Street Journal
July 29, 2009

"When a mothers' group huddled on Laurie Witt's screened porch last summer over sandwiches and iced tea, they wanted more than leisurely chit-chat. As their children played nearby, the women grilled each other in imaginary job interviews, tore apart each other's resumes and told tales of rugged job-market forays.

All had former careers--in consulting, marketing or finance--and all were intent on returning to work after years at home. The biweekly career-coaching sessions "built confidence and helped us develop a stronger game plan," says Ms. Witt, of Wellesley, Mass. Three of the four regular participants have since found jobs.

Few job seekers face higher hurdles than at-home parents trying to return to the work force. Mothers at home full-time crested in 2004 at a recent high of 31.2%, among married-couple families with children, government data show; at-home dads, who often face even greater bias than returning mothers, make up about 5%. Many of these parents now need or want to get back to work. Beyond the recession and employer bias against dropouts, many also are burdened by outdated skills and self-doubt."

MSNBC
July 29, 2009

Some moms who give up primary custody of their kids during a divorce are being harshly judged for that decision. Two moms speak out about their experiences.

Discuss on UrbanBaby: Are moms judged more harshly for giving up custody of their children when going through a divorce?

The Chicago Tribune
July 28, 2009

"Swine flu has been hitting pregnant women unusually hard, so they are likely to be among the first group advised to get a new swine flu shot this fall.

Pregnant women account for 6 percent of U.S. swine flu deaths since the pandemic began in April, even though they make up just 1 percent of the U.S. population.

On Wednesday a federal vaccine advisory panel is meeting to take up the question of who should be first to get swine flu shots when there aren't enough for everyone. At the top of the list are health care workers, who would be crucial to society during a bad pandemic.

But pregnant women may be near the top of the list because they have suffered and died from swine flu at disproportionately high rates."

Salon
July 27, 2009

"As studies about women's happiness (or, it turns out, lack thereof) keep rolling in, journalists continue to ask themselves the same question: Why, as we inch ever closer to equality of the sexes, are ladies more dissatisfied than ever? This week's attempt at an answer comes from the Guardian's Madeleine Bunting, who pegs a cultural epidemic of narcissism as the cause.

Bunting runs through a list of studies that have, by now, become familiar to those of us covering the lady beat: There is, of course, Stevenson and Wolfers' "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" (PDF), the document that provided proof that while, in the '70s, women were happier than men, men are now happier than women. (This is also the study that prompted token New York Times conservative Ross Douthat to reach the bizarre conclusion that since "the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women ... some kind of social stigma is a necessity.") Bunting also cites research by West and Sweeting, which studied mental illness among 15 year olds in Scotland in 1987, 1999 and 2006:

When the 1999 results were published, there was concern that the incidence of common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and anhedonia(loss of capacity to experience pleasure) had significantly increased for girls from 19% to 32%. The increase for boys was much smaller, at only 2%. But the latest set of results are even more dramatic. There has been an increase for both sexes: boys are now on 21%, and girls are at a staggering rate of 44%."

Double X
July 27, 2009

"When Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins was one of Time’s 2002 "People of the Year," the magazine asked her whether she thought women were somehow more ethical than men. She said no, venturing only that perhaps society's reduced expectations for women in business freed them from some of the peer pressure that prevented men from speaking out against crooked practices at their workplaces.

Seven years later, Watkins says her thoughts on the issue have "crystallized considerably." She thinks women are more likely to blow the whistle than men, for reasons that have as much to do with nature as with nurture. Some research supports her new stance, and also suggests that the way that women report corporate violations is different from the methods that men use.

The financial crisis has brought with it enough women lie detectors to convene a veritable Davos of Bitches Who Told You So. There is Brooksley Born, the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission who spent three years pushing for regulation of over-the-counter derivatives only to be struck down repeatedly by Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin. There is Sheila Bair, the only government regulator in either administration who can credibly claim to have seen the crisis coming. And this month brings us news of Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, an SEC attorney who labored in vain in 2004 to get the agency to dig deeper into Bernie Madoff's questionable investment operation."

Salon
July 23, 2009

"In 2006, a woman known only as V.M. in court documents gave birth to a baby girl, J.M.G., at a New Jersey hospital. During labor, V.M. "behaved erratically" and at some point refused to consent to a cesarean section, despite her doctor's concerns about fetal distress. The obstetrician ordered an emergency psychiatric evaluation, which found that "V.M. was not psychotic and had the capacity for informed consent with regard to the c-section." The staff then asked for a second opinion, but before the next psychiatrist could complete his evaluation, the baby was born vaginally. And healthy. Oops.

Nevertheless, a social worker at the hospital contacted the Department of Youth and Family Services, and J.M.G. was removed from her parents. Eventually, a judge agreed with DYFS that V.M. and B.G.'s parental rights should be terminated. Documents recently released by the apellate court say flat out that at that point: "the trial judge found that J.M.G. was an abused and neglected child due in part to her parents' failure to cooperate with medical personnel at the time of her birth. V.M.'s refusal to consent to a c-section factored heavily into this decision." And still, V.M. lost the appeal."

Unbelievably outrageous, right? Louise Marie Roth at the Huffington Post lays out the case for exactly why terminating a woman's parental rights for refusing a c-section is a heinous assault on her civil rights. Unfortunately, that's not why the appellate court agreed that V.M. was guilty of abuse and neglect, no matter how large a role it played in the first trial. The new documents go on to say, "irrespective of whether or not V.M. consented to the c-section, there was sufficient credible evidence to support a finding of abuse and neglect as to V.M. The majority therefore eschews any discussion of the issue of c-section."

News Week
July 17, 2009

"Stephanie Precourt will tell you that having your toddler son swallow an unknown quantity of pennies and locking your baby girl in the car in the same week may cause your heart to drop through your legs and out your toes. She'll also admit she felt like such a bad mama that she almost didn't write about either incident on her three-year-old blog, Adventures in Baby Wearing.

But she's glad she did. After Precourt posted each item, her readers commiserated on the blog with their own confessions of accidentally dropping the baby on his or her head or finding a screw up their kid's nose. "[When I first became a mom] I was picking up the parenting magazines, and that's just not real," says Precourt, now a mother of four. "Those moms have clean homes and perfect kids. As a stay-at-home mom, [blogging] gave me a connection with other real moms, with the outside world."

Being a "real mom" has a way of earning a mommy blogger some serious virtual cred. So if someone like Precourt suggests that Fiber One bars are great for, um, helping a kid pass a few pennies, her readers take that to heart. Now companies are betting that mommy bloggers are the gatekeepers to a female segment that spends about $2 trillion a year for their families. Already, the active U.S. female Internet population hovers around 42 million, according to the 2009 Social Media Study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners. Of those women, 43 percent visit blogs for advice or to get recommendations."