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    He has already fathered many children. Now Musk wants all of the US to embrace extreme breeding | Arwa Mahdawi

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    Is Elon Musk the dinner party guest from hell? It sure seems that way. Not only is the man desperate for people to laugh at his crass jokes, he reportedly has a weird habit of trying to donate his sperm at every opportunity – including, according to an October New York Times report, an incident where he offered some spermatozoa, as casually as you might pass the salt, to a married couple “he had met socially only a handful of times” during a Silicon Valley dinner party.Musk has denied offering sperm to strangers over supper. But it would be in keeping with his creepy breeding fetish: Musk is desperate for people in developed countries to have more children and has himself fathered at least 12 children with three women. (One of the children has since sadly died.) He’s become one of the most famous faces of a growing pro-natalist movement – one with an unsettling overlap with eugenics and deeply misogynistic ideas.Musk is obviously entitled to his obsessions. The problem is, now that he’s Donald Trump’s BFF, he actually has the opportunity to embed his obsessions into policy. While much has been said about Musk’s role in the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, it seems likely that the billionaire wants influence over more than just budgets. He seems to want a say in Americans’ sex lives as well. On Sunday, Musk replied to a tweet about declining birthrates by tweeting: “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.”What sort of lessons would that entail? Teaching people that while a woman dies every two minutes due to pregnancy or childbirth – and maternal mortality rates are increasing in the US – it’s childlessness you should be afraid of? It’s easy for Musk, who will never have to carry any of the children he’s so keen on having, to be blase about pregnancy risks: he can outsource them all. Still, you’d think he might be more sensitive to the issue considering the musician Grimes, with whom he shares three children, almost died during her pregnancy with son X Æ A-12. That led Grimes and Musk to use a surrogate for their next child.What else would Musk tell young people to instil a fear of childlessness? That, should they choose not to procreate, they’ll be saddled with more disposable income than they might otherwise have? And they won’t have to fret about the fact the US is the only industrialised country without a national paid parental leave policy? Or should he really put the fear of God in them and explain that they’ll miss out on being woken up at 5am and having to listen to the Frozen soundtrack for the millionth time? Look, I love my child (I’ve even grown to love the Frozen soundtrack), but parenthood can be difficult and it’s not for everyone. There are plenty of ways to live a fulfilling life that don’t involve raising a mini-me.I’ll tell you one lesson that I wish Musk would learn: being a sperm donor is very different from being a parent. While Musk has been parading various children of his through Mar-a-Lago for photo opportunities recently, he seems to leave most of the hard work of parenting to others. I mean, come on, he has six children under the age of six, runs a bunch of major companies and spends all his time hobnobbing with politicians: it’s logistically impossible for him to be an involved father to all his children. He’s also estranged from his transgender daughter Vivian Wilson, and has publicly declared – on at least two occasions – that she is “dead – killed by the woke mind virus”.But Musk’s parenting skills aren’t the real issue here. The real issue is that the billionaire, and his breeding obsession, are part of an incoming administration that wants to roll back reproductive rights and usher in a world where women are forced to give birth. It would be nice to be able to ignore every stupid thing that Musk tweets, but we don’t have that luxury any more. He seems intent on worming his way into our wombs. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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      Fur and loathing: do America’s ‘childless cat ladies’ hold the key to the US election?

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      When writer and artist Alice Maddicott’s beloved rescue cat died, she was understandably bereft. Dylan was a proper character, she says, the kind of gregarious cat that follows you to the pub or for a walk. But mourning him made Alice, who was then in her late 30s and single, feel faintly self-conscious. What if people thought she was a mad cat lady, weeping spinsterish tears for her pet?“If I’d had a dog, there would be no stereotype. But as a single woman approaching 40, it could be seen very differently,” says Maddicott. Curious about the origins of such a kneejerk prejudice, she started digging into its history. The research became a book, Cat Women, reclaiming an insult long used to belittle older women (especially non-compliant ones) or frighten younger women into settling down, lest they end up like the crazy cat lady from The Simpsons: once a high achiever, now a burnt-out drunk.But as Maddicott points out, it’s an objectively ridiculous insult. There’s no such thing as a “crazy cat man” and single hamster owners aren’t considered a threat to the patriarchal order. Only cat ladies touch a nerve, because only cat ladies immediately conjure up the idea of witches.In medieval times, the devil was believed to give cats as gifts to women inducted into witchcraft, Maddicott explains: so strong was the association that at the Bideford witch trials in 17th-century Devon, one woman was accused after a cat was seen slipping in through her window. “Probably an eccentric older woman feeding a stray, but that was used to condemn her.” Single women, unrestrained and also undefended by any man, made dangerously easy scapegoats if sickness came or the crops failed. Thankfully, people no longer believe in witches ruining lives out of spite. Or do they?Three years ago, the then aspiring Republican senator (and now vice-presidential candidate) JD Vance complained on Fox News that America was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He named then vice-president Kamala Harris, secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg (who is gay) and the young New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as politicians who supposedly had no stake in the future they were legislating for.The idea that if you haven’t given birth, you don’t count, was hurtful to many doting stepmothers (as Harris is) or adoptive parents (like Buttigieg). But most incendiary of all was the idea that not having children renders a person a bitter, vengeful husk, desperate to drag everyone else down with them. Polling this summer, after those comments were dug up and recirculated, found two-thirds of Americans disagreed that not having biological children was a hindrance in a president; even among Republicans, only 15% agreed.View image in fullscreenThough Vance now insists he was merely being sarcastic, for many women on both sides of the Atlantic, those words summed up a strand of politics that seemingly values them mainly for their ability to procreate and views their right to choose with suspicion. Though powerful women have long been shamed for not being mothers – “deliberately barren”, the former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard’s opponents called her – in the current climate, attacks on childless cat ladies have a sharper edge.In both the US and Europe, rightwing parties are weaponising female fertility as a political issue, tapping into a potent mix of misogyny, economic anxiety and overtly racist angst about being “replaced” as the dominant culture if white women don’t start breeding more enthusiastically. Though falling birth rates across the developed world are an undeniable economic headache – shrinking populations mean fewer young workers to fund pensions for the old and, typically, lower growth – populists focus on the way a dwindling workforce leads to more imported labour. Hungary’s populist leader Viktor Orbán has claimed the west is “committing suicide” by not making babies; in Germany, the far right AfD called in its manifesto for “larger families instead of mass immigration”. Elon Musk, the X owner and Donald Trump donor, tweets in apocalyptic terms about impending “population collapse”.Yet still, the baby drought persists. Around one in five British women don’t have children by the end of their fertile years – the Office for National Statistics doesn’t keep equivalent statistics for men – and this year deaths overtook births for the first time (outside a pandemic) since the 1970s. Almost half of Americans under 50, meanwhile, are childless. Or should that be childfree? For this year of shaming women has also been a year of women refusing to be shamed: older women reclaiming witchy insults like “hag” and “crone”, while younger ones resist what they see as a Handmaid’s Tale future of curtailed rights over their own bodies.Like the cat-eared pink hats that anti-Trump marchers wore in 2017, referencing his boasts about grabbing women “by the pussy”, in 2024 a “Childless Cat Lady for Kamala” T-shirt or sticker is now a gleeful statement of defiance. When Taylor Swift identified as one in her Instagram post formally endorsing Harris, it felt like something of a Spartacus moment – arguably even more so when Elon Musk responded with a creepy tweet offering to get her pregnant.What’s different about Swift isn’t merely that she, too, is unmarried, childfree and a cat owner at 34; it’s that she makes it look like a blast. Rich, powerful and taking her pick of trophy boyfriends, she lives closer to what would once have been called a rakish bachelor’s life than a spinster’s – though these days spinsterdom is a story told very differently.In Kate Winslet’s recent feminist biopic Lee, about the pioneering Second World War photographer Lee Miller, there is a scene in which Winslet’s Miller and Vogue magazine editor Audrey Withers ask each other if they’re planning to have children. “God no,” says Withers, cheerfully. “Oh God no,” echoes Winslet’s Miller. It’s a bonding moment in the film which implies neither could have done what they did – in Miller’s case following the US army’s advance across Europe and documenting newly liberated concentration camps; and in Withers’s case battling the censors to publish her images – if they’d had families at home. Though Miller did eventually have a son after the war, the film doesn’t duck the fact their relationship was difficult and ultimately lets her work take centre stage. It’s how great men’s stories are often told, drawing a veil over domestic shortcomings, but more rarely women’s.View image in fullscreenOnce upon a time in Hollywood, childless women could be mad, murderous bunny boilers – in films like Single White Female and Fatal Attraction – or at a push Bridget Jones, terrified of dying “fat and alone”. Now they can be Carrie Bradshaw, reimagined in And Just Like That… as a sexy fiftysomething widow with a fluffy rescue cat, or even Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the eternally childless doll who (according to her creator Ruth Handler) “always represented the fact that a woman has choices”. Though the film has a darker side, with the Kens’ angry revolt against the Barbie matriarchy echoing a backlash many young women say they’re experiencing in real life, the Barbieland both sides seek to control is a hedonistic land of parties and beach days where nobody is spending their Saturdays bleary-eyed at soft play. The toymaker Mattel has always resisted pleas to give Barbie and Ken children; instead they stayed forever aspirational Dinks, an 80s acronym for Dual Income No Kids now gleefully revived by millennials.“We’re DINKs. Of course we are already planning our European vacation next year,” says TikToker @johnefinance, in a chirpy post last December that racked up over 290,000 likes. “We’re DINKs; we spend our discretionary income on $8 lattes,” his partner giggles. Social media is still awash with #dinkcouple posts bragging about how much more money, sex and sleep they get compared to haggard new parents, recasting childless life as the opposite of sad and empty. Unusually, the trend brings young men’s perspectives into a debate normally (and exhaustingly) focused on women. But it also reflects polling released by the Pew Center thinktank earlier this year showing the most common reason childless Americans under 50 give for not being parents is that they just don’t want to.TikTok’s Dinks are young, and maybe not ruling parenthood out forever. But for now their lives arguably look a lot more fun than being a tradwife, those sourdough-baking, God-fearing, home-schooling mothers of multiple children whose retro social media content is – depending on your view – either a bit of guilty escapist fantasy for tired working women or a sinister attempt to drag women back into the kitchen. This summer a British newspaper interview with uber-tradwife Hannah Neeleman (aka @ballerinafarm), in which the writer wondered how exactly she’d ended up sacrificing a ballet career to have eight children and why her husband kept answering questions for her, triggered days of debate about whether she was being secretly oppressed or whether (as Neeleman’s fans argued) this was a hit piece by a writer who doesn’t have kids.Cut through all the noise, however, and there is one clear signal: neither the tradwife nor the Dink camp seem to think having it all is an option any more. You can’t have kids and a career in ballet; you can’t have a thrilling social life and children. You have to choose, with the implication that either way, something is lost. If there is a sadness to Neeleman talking about giving up on her professional ambitions, there is a faint whiff of financial distress around some of those Dink reels, too; a sense they’re blowing their cash on bucket-list travel destinations because the idea of buying a family home (while paying nursery bills that cost more than a mortgage) seems wildly out of reach.The second most common reason childless Britons aged 35-44 gave for not having children (after thinking they were too old) was a split between “I don’t want the impact on my lifestyle” and “the cost is too high”, according to YouGov. But for those on tight budgets, the two are related. It may be no accident that Britain’s last mini-baby boom was in the early Noughties – fuelled by cheaper childcare, longer maternity leave and rising prosperity – or that it fizzled out with the 2009 recession.On both sides of the Atlantic, women who do want kids some day are tired of being blamed for their childlessness by politicians who seemingly won’t meet them halfway: who instead of building cheap houses for first-time buyers or slashing their nursery bills, suggest (in Vance’s case) that grandparents could help out for free. But for some women, there’s an added worry that politicians cajoling or shaming women into having children may eventually turn to forcing them.For American women under 30, abortion is now the number one election issue, according to an October poll by the health policy researchers KFF. Two years ago, the overturning of Roe v Wade – the landmark ruling underpinning legal abortion in America – left the way open for an all-out assault on reproductive rights. At campaign rally after rally, Harris has hammered away at fears of what a Republican administration might do. She often quotes Project 2025, the infamous leaked wishlist for a second Trump term drawn up by a rightwing thinktank, which argues for giving foetuses legal rights and scrapping funding for contraceptive services.In Europe, too, rightwing governments in Hungary, Italy and Poland have tightened abortion law, though furious female voters helped propel a pro-liberalisation Polish government into power last year.For now, Britain seems to be on a much more progressive path. The prospect of curbs on abortion in this parliament looks at first glance remote, though the Labour MP Stella Creasy – who has been aggressively targeted in her constituency by anti-abortion activists – argues complacency is dangerous. “If the election hadn’t been called, it’s not clear that we wouldn’t have seen the first rollback on rights in 50 years,” she says, pointing to a backbench attempt to reduce the legal time limit from 24 to 22 weeks in the dying months of the last Conservative government.But the Tory MP Miriam Cates – who once argued that dwindling fertility rates are “the one overarching threat” to western society – lost her seat in July, while the Tory leadership favourite Kemi Badenoch says she isn’t convinced governments can make women have babies.America’s fate, however, still hangs by a thread, with a stark divide emerging particularly among the young: women for Harris, angry young men for Trump.Whether she wins or whether she loses in the coming election, it almost certainly won’t be because (along with every other occupant of the Oval Office in history) Kamala Harris hasn’t physically given birth. Most Americans say this election is still about the economy, stupid. But what is clear from months of arguing about childless cat ladies is that being one is just another American story now.When the pollsters Ipsos went looking this summer for female voters with no kids at home, but with a feline companion, the surprise was all the ways in which they were pretty much like everyone else: mostly suburban, disproportionately white, mostly with some college education, no richer or poorer than average – and in almost a third of cases, Republicans. They’re living behind the same white-picket fences as everyone else, shopping at Target, working nine to five, just getting on with life. And the clearer that becomes, the harder it is to pretend that every childless cat lady is a witch.View image in fullscreenFeline friendshipCat lover and author Britt Collins on her furry companionsI never imagined that childless cat ladies would become a political force and a whole new demographic. Over the years, I’ve heard all the snarks: mad, lonely, obsessive – the old witch-hunting slurs that have dogged outlier women forever. Am I miserable by the choices I made? Hell, no. Here’s the thing, cats rock and I don’t have to defend my choices. If I wanted kids, I’d have adopted one.The only time I felt lonely was in the last year of my marriage when I lost my sense of self. I’ve had boyfriends since I was 15, always cat men, and I still adore my two long-term exes with whom I spent my 20s and 30s. I’ve raised dozens of strays with them and had the best of times. However, these days, my ideal man is a gay vet. I’m happy with my mogs, enjoying the deep, uncomplicated love and pure joy of feline friendship.Still, I’ve had strangers tell me that giving up on relationships, as I moved into my 50s, is no way to live. Women and the cats they love have long been maligned, somehow seen as lesser-than or unfulfilled. Carving out my own little universe, I’ve filled it with cats and creativity. I’ve travelled to more than 35 countries, looked after big cats, baboons, bats and various wild orphans, written two books, ghostwritten and edited others, edited and created magazines, run a sell-out cat festival, directed pop videos and completed the screenplay adaption for my book, Strays, that has sparked interest from Hollywood producers. I do what I want, when I want – enjoying the privileges historically afforded to men.Journalist and activist Gloria Steinem, who’s had many felines over the decades, credits them as her teachers ‘when it comes to a strong will and self-authority’. When Steinem was asked how to raise the next generation of feminists, she said: ‘Like cats. They tell you what they’re going to do, and that’s that.’Cats, with their punky attitudes, have taught me defiance and everything else worth knowing. They are sensualists, things of beauty, who’ve inspired artists for centuries. Lennon, McCartney, Bowie, Dylan and many of the greatest rock stars were all crazy-cat ladies. Us cat people of all political stripes may not agree on everything, but we don’t let it get in the way of what matters most.Strays: A Lost Cat, A Homeless Man and Their Journey Across America by Britt Collins is published by Simon & Schuster More

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      in US Politics

      Alabama is using the notion that embryos are people to surveil and harass women | Moira Donegan

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      Something that’s important to remember about last week’s ruling by the Alabama supreme court, which held that frozen embryos were persons under state law, is that the very absurdity of the claim is itself a demonstration of power. That a frozen embryo – a microscopic bit of biological information that can’t even be called tissue, a flick laden with the hopes of aspiring parents but fulfilling none of them – is equivalent in any way to a child is the sort of thing you can only say if no one has the power to laugh at you. The Alabama supreme court is the final court of review in that state. It cannot be appealed. For the foreseeable future, frozen cells in Alabama have the same legal status there as you or I do. Is this an absurd elevation of the status of an embryo, or an obscene degradation of human beings? The answer, of course, is both.The decision immediately halted almost all IVF procedures in Alabama. Aspiring patents there – including women who had undergone rounds of injected hormone treatments and the invasive, gruelingly painful egg retrieval process in order to create the embryos – will now be unable to have the material implanted in an attempt to create a pregnancy. Hundreds of other frozen embryos – those that are not viable, or not needed by families that are already complete – can now not be destroyed as is typical IVF practice. They need to be continually stored in freezers, or what the Alabama supreme court refers to, in Orwellian style, as “cryogenic nurseries”, a term you almost have to admire for the sheer audacity of its creepiness.But the concept of embryonic personhood, now inscribed in Alabama law, poses dangers well beyond the cruelty it has imposed on the hopeful couples who were pursuing IVF in Alabama, before their state supreme court made that impossible. If embryos and fetuses are people, as Alabama now says they are, then whole swaths of women’s daily lives come under the purview of state scrutiny.Forget about abortion, which would automatically be banned as murder in any situation where fetuses are considered persons – Alabama already has a total abortion ban, without exceptions for rape, incest or health. Embryonic personhood would also ban many kinds of birth control, such as Plan B, IUDs, and some hormonal birth control pills, which courts have said can be interpreted as working by preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg. (In fact these methods work primarily by preventing ovulation, but facts are of dwindling relevance in the kind of anti-abortion litigation that comes before Republican-controlled courts.)Further, if embryos and fetuses are children, then the state may have an interest in protecting their lives that extends to controlling even more of women’s daily conduct. Could a woman who is pregnant, or could be pregnant, have a right to do things that might endanger her embryo in a situation where an embryo is her legal equal, with a claim on state protection? Could she risk this embryo’s health and life by, say, eating sushi, or having some soft cheese? Forget about the wine. Could she be charged with child endangerment for speeding? For going on a jog?These scenarios might sound hyperbolic, but they are not entirely hypothetical. Even before the Alabama court began enforcing the vulgar fiction that a frozen embryo is a person, authorities there had long used the notion of fetal personhood to harass, intimidate and jail women – often those suspected of using drugs during pregnancies – under the state’s “chemical endangerment of a child” law, using the theory that women’s bodies are environments that they have an obligation to keep free of “chemicals” that could harm a fetus or infringe upon its rights.Using this logic, police in Alabama, and particularly in rural Etowah county, north-east of Birmingham, have repeatedly jailed women for allegedly using drugs ranging from marijuana to meth while pregnant – including women who have claimed that they did not use drugs, and women who turned out not to be pregnant. In 2021, Kim Blalock, a mother of six, was arrested on felony charges after filling a doctor’s prescription during a pregnancy; the state of Alabama decided that it knew better than her doctor, and they could criminalize her for following medical advice.This is not an extreme example: it is the logical conclusion of fetal personhood’s legalization – the surveillance, jailing and draconian monitoring of pregnant women, an exercise in voyeuristic sadism justified by the flimsy pretext that it’s all being done for the good of children. Except there are no children. Lest this seem like an idea that will necessarily be corrected by political response, or by the ultimate intervention of a federal court on the question, remember that Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs referred repeatedly to “unborn human beings”.There are several ways this supreme court could ban abortion nationwide, and they do not need to enforce fetal personhood to do so – many rightwing organizations, for instance, are encouraging federal courts to revive the long-dormant Comstock Act, from the 1870s, to ban all abortions. Nor will the ultimate national abortion ban necessarily even come from the courts. Any future Republican president will be under enormous pressure to enact a national abortion ban, and they will have many means at their disposal to do so even without congressional cooperation, be it through the justice department or through the FDA. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee in all but name, has floated the idea of a 16-week national ban – a huge restriction on women’s right’s nationwide that would undoubtably be just the opening salvo for even further rollbacks. Meanwhile, his nominal rival, Nikki Haley, responded to the news of the Alabama court ruling by voicing approval of fetal personhood. “Embryos, to me, are babies.”Let’s be clear: they are not. An embryo is not a child. Neither is a fetus. Treating them as such is a legal absurdity that degrades human life and insults the reality of parenthood. But most importantly: there is no notion of when personhood begins that is compatible with women’s citizenship other than birth. If personhood begins while a pregnancy is ongoing – if a person, that is, can be someone enclosed entirely inside another person’s body – then the competition of rights will be humiliatingly, violently, brutally one-sided. None of the opportunities, freedoms or responsibilities of citizenship are available to someone whose body is constantly surveilled, commandeered and colonized by the state like that. No citizenship worth its name can belong to someone who cannot even wield within the bounds of her own skin.It is humiliating to even have to say this: that women matter more than fetuses or embryos, that a frozen cell in a petri dish is not a human being, but we are. It is an absurdity to make this argument, an exhausting waste of our time, a degradation. That, too, is part of the point.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Is everyone doing this perfectly but me?’ Michelle Obama on the guilt and anxiety of being a mother – and her golden parenting rules

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      ‘Is everyone doing this perfectly but me?’ Michelle Obama on the guilt and anxiety of being a mother – and her golden parenting rules In an exclusive extract from her new book, the former first lady shares what she learned about raising a family while living in the White HouseAfter Barack was elected president, word got out that Marian Robinson, my 71-year-old mother, was planning to move to the White House with us. The idea was that she’d help look after Sasha and Malia, who were seven and 10 at the time, at least until they were settled. She’d make sure that everyone adjusted OK and then move back to Chicago. The media seemed instantly charmed by this notion, requesting interviews with my mother and producing a slew of stories, dubbing her “First Granny” and “Grandmother-in Chief”. It was as if a new and potentially exciting character had been added to the cast of a network drama. Suddenly, my mother was in the news. She was news.If you’ve ever met my mother, however, you’ll know that the last thing she wants is to be well known. She agreed to do a handful of interviews, figuring it was just part of the larger transition process, though she said, again and again, that she was surprised that anyone would care.By her own measure, my mom is nothing special. She also likes to say that while she loves us dearly, my brother and I are not special, either. We’re just two kids who had enough love and a good amount of luck and happened to do well as a result. She tries to remind people that neighbourhoods like the South Side of Chicago are packed full of “little Michelles and little Craigs”. They’re in every school, on every block. It’s just that too many of them get overlooked and underestimated. This would probably count as the foundational point of my mom’s larger philosophy: “All children are great children.”My mother is now 85. She operates with a quiet and mirthful grace. Glamour and gravitas mean nothing to her. She sees right through it, believing that all people should be treated the same. I’ve seen her talk to the pope and to the postman, approaching them both with the same mild-mannered, unflappable demeanour. If someone asks her a question, she responds in plain and direct terms, never catering her answers to suit a particular audience. This is another thing about my mother: she doesn’t believe in fudging the truth.What this meant as we transitioned into the White House was that any time a reporter posed a question to my mom, she would answer it candidly rather than soft-pedalling her thoughts or hewing to any set of talking points generated by nervous communications staffers. Which is how she surfaced in the national news, describing how she’d been dragged kicking and screaming from her quiet little bungalow on Euclid Avenue and more or less forced to live at the nation’s most famous address. She was not being ungracious; she was just being real. How my mom expressed herself to the reporters on this matter was no different than how she’d expressed herself to me. She had not wanted to come to Washington, but I had flat-out begged her. My mother was the rock of our family. Since the time our daughters were babies, she’d helped us out around the edges of our regular childcare arrangements, filling the gaps as Barack and I often improvised and occasionally flailed our way through different career transitions, heavy workload cycles, and the ever-burgeoning after-school lives of our two young girls.So, yes, I did kind of force her to come.The problem was that she was content at home. She had recently retired. She liked her own life in her own space and was uninterested in change more generally. The house on Euclid had all her trinkets. It had the bed she’d slept in for more than 30 years. Her feeling was that the White House felt too much like a museum and too little like a home. (And yes, of course, she voiced this observation directly to a reporter.) But even as she made it known that her move to Washington was largely involuntary and intended to be temporary, she affirmed that her love for Sasha and Malia in the end eclipsed everything else. “If somebody’s going to be with these kids other than their parents,” she told a reporter, giving a shrug, “it better be me.”After that, she decided she was pretty much done giving interviews.Once she’d moved in, my mother became very popular in the White House, even if she wasn’t looking to be. Everyone referred to her simply as “Mrs R”. People on staff enjoyed her precisely because she was so low-key. The butlers, who were mostly Black, liked having a Black grandma in the house. They showed her photos of their own grandkids and occasionally tapped her for life advice. Secret Service agents kept tabs on her on days when she wandered out the gates and headed to the CVS [pharmacy] on 14th Street or when she dropped by Betty Currie’s house – Betty being Bill Clinton’s former secretary – to play cards. The staff housekeepers were often trying to get my mother to let them do more for her, though Mom made it clear that nobody should wait on or clean up after her when she knew perfectly well how to do all that herself.“Just show me how to work the washing machine and I’m good,” she said.Aware of the favour she was doing us, we tried to keep her duties light. She rode with Sasha and Malia to and from school, helping them adjust to the new routine. On days I was busy with Flotus duties, she made sure the girls had snacks and whatever else they needed for after-school activities. Just as she had when I was an elementary-school student, she listened with interest to their tales about what had unfolded over the course of the day. When she and I had time alone, she’d fill me in on anything I’d missed in the kids’ day and then she’d do the same sort of listening for me, acting as my sponge and sounding board.When she wasn’t looking after the girls, my mom made herself deliberately scarce. Her feeling was that we should have our own family life, independent of her. And she felt that she, too, should have a life independent of us. She liked her freedom. She liked her space. She had come to DC with only one intention, and that was to be a reliable support to Barack and me and a caring grandmother to our two kids. Everything else, as far as she saw it, was just fuss and noise.Sometimes we would host VIP guests for a dinner party in the White House residence. They’d look around and ask where my mother was, wondering whether she’d be joining us for the meal.I’d usually just laugh and point up towards the third floor, where she had a bedroom and liked to hang out in a nearby sitting room, which had big windows that looked out at the Washington Monument. “Nope,” I’d say, “Grandma’s upstairs in her happy place.”This essentially was code for: “Sorry, Bono, Mom’s got a glass of wine, some pork ribs on her TV tray, and Jeopardy! is on. Don’t for one second think you could ever compete … ”My mom ended up staying with us in the White House for the whole eight years. Our girls morphed from wide-eyed elementary-schoolers into teenagers in full bloom, intent on achieving independence and the privileges of adult life. As teenagers do, they tested a few limits and did some dumb things. Someone got grounded for missing curfew. Someone posted an eyebrow-raising bikini selfie on Instagram and was promptly instructed by the East Wing communications team to remove it. Someone once had to be dragged by Secret Service agents from an out-of-hand, unsupervised high-school party just as local law enforcement was arriving. Someone talked back to the president of the United States when he had the audacity to ask how she could possibly study Spanish while listening to rap.An episode of even mild disobedience or misbehaviour from our adolescent daughters would set off a ripple of unsettling worry in me. It preyed upon my greatest fear, which was that life in the White House was messing our kids up. One tiny thing would go wrong, and my mother-guilt would kick in. I’d start second-guessing every choice Barack and I had ever made. Self-scrutiny is something women are programmed to excel at, having been thrust into systems of inequality and fed fully unrealistic images of female “perfection” from the time we were kids ourselves. None of us – truly none – ever live up. For mothers, the feelings of not-enoughness can be especially acute. The images of maternal perfection we encounter in advertisements and across social media are often no less fake than what we see on the enhanced and Photoshopped female bodies that are so often upheld as the societal gold standard for beauty. But still, we are conditioned to buy into it, questing after not just the perfect body, but also perfect children, perfect work-life balances, perfect family experiences, and perfect levels of patience. It’s hard not to look around as a mother and think, Is everyone doing this perfectly but me?I am as prone to this type of self-laceration as the next person. At any sign of conflict or challenge with our kids, I would instantly and ferociously start scanning for my own mistakes. Had I been too tough on them or too indulging? Had I been too present or too absent? Was there some parenting book I’d forgotten to study 15 years earlier? Was this a bona fide crisis, a sign of bigger problems? Which critical life lessons had I failed to impart? And was it too late now?As a parent, you are always fighting your own desperation not to fail at the job you’ve been given. There are whole industries built to feed and capitalise on this very desperation, from baby brain gyms and ergonomic strollers to Sat coaches. It’s like a hole that can’t ever be filled. I’m sorry to say that this doesn’t end with any one milestone, either. The desperation doesn’t go away when your kid learns to sleep or walk, or graduates from high school, or even moves into their first apartment and buys a set of steak knives. You will still worry! You will still be afraid for them! Even now, my husband, the former commander-in-chief, can’t help but to text cautionary news stories to our daughters – about the dangers of highway driving or walking alone at night. When they moved to California, he emailed them a lengthy article about earthquake preparedness and offered to have Secret Service give them a natural-disaster-response briefing. (This was met with a polite “No thanks”.)Caring for your kids and watching them grow is one of the most rewarding endeavours on Earth, and at the same time it can drive you nuts.Over the years, I’ve had one secret weapon to help stem the tide of parental anxiety, though – and that’s my own mother. If you’re around her enough, you will start to notice that she is prone to dropping little pearls of wisdom into everyday conversation. Usually, they’re connected to her belief that it’s possible to raise decent children without drama or fuss. These are never blustery proclamations delivered with fury or passion. They tend to be wry thoughts that just slip out quietly, almost like stray pennies falling from her pocket.For years now, I’ve been collecting these pennies, stuffing my own pockets full of them, using them for guidance and as a tool to offset my own doubts and worries as a parent. For a while, I was thinking that maybe my mother should write her own book, that she could tell her life story and share some of the insights that I personally have found to be so valuable. But when I suggested it, she just waved me off, saying: “Now, why on earth would I do that?”She has given me permission, however, to share a few of her more tried-and-true maxims here, some of the points she’s made that have helped me to become a slightly calmer, slightly less guilt-ridden, slightly more decent parent to my own kids. But only if I attach the following disclaimer, which comes direct from my mom herself: “Just make sure they know I’m not in the business of telling anybody how to live.”1. Teach your kids to wake themselves upWhen I was five and starting kindergarten, my parents gifted me with a small electric alarm clock. It had a square face, with little green glow-in-the-dark hands that pointed toward the hour and the minute. My mom showed me how to set my wake-up time and how to turn the alarm off when it buzzed. She then helped me work backwards through all the things I’d need to do in the morning – eat my breakfast, brush my hair and teeth, pick out my clothes, and so on – in order to calculate how many minutes it would take to get myself up and out the door to school. She was there to provide instruction, she’d furnished me with the tool, but the challenge of using it effectively became mine to figure out.And I freaking loved that alarm clock. I loved what it gave me – which was power and agency over my own little life. My mom, I realise now, had passed on this particular tool at a deliberately chosen window early enough in my development, before I was old enough to be cynical about having to get up for school in the morning, before she’d ever have to start shaking me awake herself. It spared her the hassle in some ways, but the real gift was to me: I could wake myself up.If I ever did sleep through my alarm, or otherwise get lazy and drag my feet about going to school, my mother was not interested in doing any nagging or cajoling. She remained hands-off, making clear that my life was largely my own. “Listen, I got my education,” she’d say. “I’ve already been to school. This isn’t about me.”2. It isn’t about you. Good parents are always working to put themselves out of businessThe alarm-clock approach was representative of an even more deliberate undertaking on my parents’ part, and that was to help us kids learn to get on our feet and stay on our feet, not just physically but emotionally. From the day she birthed each of her children, my mother was striving toward a singular goal, and that was to render herself more or less obsolete in our lives. My mom made no bones about the fact that especially when it came to day-to-day practical tasks, her plan was to become as unnecessary in our lives as possible, as quickly as possible. The sooner that time arrived, the more successful she’d deem herself to be as a parent. “I’m not raising babies,” she used to say. “I am raising adults.”It may sound scandalous to say, especially in an era when helicopter-parenting has become de rigueur, but I’m pretty sure that most of my mom’s decision-making was guided by one basic question: What’s the minimum I can do for them right now?This was not a cavalier or self-serving question, but rather a deeply thoughtful one. In our home, self-sufficiency mattered above all else. My mom believed that her hands only got in the way of our hands. If there was something new we needed to learn, she’d show us a way to do it and then quickly step aside. This meant that with the aid of a step stool, Craig and I learned how to wash and dry the dishes long before we were tall enough to reach the sink. We were required to make our beds and do our own laundry as a matter of habit.We did a fair amount of this stuff imperfectly, but the point was we were doing it. My mother wasn’t stepping in. She didn’t correct our errors or squelch our way of doing things, even if our way was slightly different from hers. This, I believe, was my first taste of power. I liked being trusted to get something done. “It’s easier for kids to make mistakes when they’re little,” my mom told me recently when I asked her about this. “Let them make them. And then you can’t make too big a deal out of it, either. Because if you do, they’ll stop trying.”She sat by and allowed us to struggle and make mistakes – with our chores, our homework, and our relationships with various teachers, coaches and friends. None of it was tied to her own self-worth or ego, or done for bragging rights. It was not about her at all, she would say. She was busy trying to wash her hands of us, after all. This meant that her mood didn’t rise or fall on our victories. Her happiness wasn’t dictated by whether we came home with As on our report cards, whether Craig scored a lot of points at his basketball game, or I got elected to student council. When good things happened, she was happy for us. When bad things happened, she’d help us process it before returning to her own chores and challenges. The important thing was that she loved us regardless of whether we succeeded or failed. She lit up with gladness any time we walked through the door.On days when I came home stewing about something a teacher had done (and, I’ll admit, this happened with some regularity), my mom would stand in the kitchen and listen to whatever tirade I had to unleash about the unfairness of some teacher’s remark, or the stupidity of an assignment, or how Mrs So-and-So clearly didn’t know what she was doing. And when I was finished, when the steam of my anger had dissipated to the point that I could think clearly, she’d ask a simple question – one that was fully sincere and also, at the same time, just a tiny bit leading. “Do you need me to go in there for you?”There were a couple of instances over the years when I did genuinely need my mom’s help, and I got it. But 99% of the time, I did not need her to go in on my behalf. Just by asking that question, and by giving me a chance to respond, she was subtly pushing me to continue reasoning out the situation in my head. How bad was it actually? What were the solutions? What could I do?This is how, in the end, I usually knew I could trust my own answer, which was: “I think I can handle it.”My mother helped me to learn how to puzzle out my own feelings and strategies for dealing with them, in large part by just giving them room and taking care not to smother them with her own feelings or opinions. If I got overly sulky about something, she’d tell me to go do one of my chores, not as punishment, exactly, but rather as a means of right-sizing the problem. “Get up and clean that bathroom,” she’d say. “It’ll put your mind on things other than yourself.”Inside of our small home, she created a kind of emotional sandbox where Craig and I could safely rehearse our feelings and sort through our responses to whatever was going on in our young lives. Once, when I was in high school and unhappy about having to deal with a math teacher who struck me as arrogant, my mom heard my complaint, nodded understandingly, and then shrugged. “You don’t have to like your teacher, and she doesn’t have to like you,” she said. “But she’s got math in her head that you need in yours, so maybe you should just go to school and get the math.”She looked at me then and smiled, as if this should be the simplest thing in the world to grasp. “You can come home to be liked,” she said. “We will always like you here.”3. Know what’s truly preciousMy mom remembers that the house she grew up in on the South Side had a big coffee table at the centre of the living room, made of smooth, delicate glass. It was breakable, and so everyone in the family was forced to navigate around it, almost on tiptoe.She was a studious observer of her own family, my mother. She sat squarely in the middle of seven children, which gave her a lot to watch. She had three older siblings and three younger ones, plus two parents who appeared to be polar opposites and didn’t much get along. She saw how her father – my grandfather Southside – tended to baby his kids. He drove them around in his car so that they wouldn’t need to take the bus, afraid of what lay beyond his control. He woke them up in the mornings so they wouldn’t need to set an alarm. He seemed to enjoy their dependence on him.My grandmother Rebecca – my mom’s mom – meanwhile, was stiff and proper, patently unhappy and possibly (my mother believes now) clinically depressed. When she was young, she dreamed of being a nurse, but apparently her mother, a washerwoman who’d raised seven kids, had told her that going to nursing school cost a lot of money and Black nurses rarely got good jobs. So Rebecca married my grandfather and had seven children instead, never seeming terribly content with what her life had yielded. The governing edict in Grandmother Rebecca’s house was that children should be seen and not heard. At the dinner table, my mom and her siblings were instructed to stay silent, to listen mutely and respectfully to the adult conversation around them. When her mother’s friends came to visit their home, my mom and her siblings were required to join the adults in the living room. All of them – from toddlers to teens – were expected to sit politely at the edges, permitted to say nothing more than hello.My mother describes long evenings spent in that room with her mouth clamped shut in agony, hearing plenty of adult-speak she wanted to engage with, plenty of ideas she’d want to quibble with or at least better understand. It must have been during these hours that my mother arrived at the idea, even unconsciously, that her own kids some day would be not just allowed but encouraged to speak. No earnest question would ever be disallowed. Laughter and tears were permitted. Nobody would need to tiptoe.One night, when someone new stopped in for a visit, my mom remembers the woman surveying all the young faces and restless bodies packed into the living room and finally posing a logical question: “How possibly could you have a glass table like this and all of these kids?” She doesn’t recall how my grandmother responded, but my mom knew what the real answer was: her own mother had missed a fundamental lesson about what was precious and what was not. What was the point of seeing children without hearing them?One evening, finally, when my mom was about 12, some grown-up friends came over to their house to visit and, for some foolish reason, one of them happened to sit down on the table. To my grandmother’s horror, and as her children watched silently, it shattered into pieces on the floor. For Mom, it was a bit of cosmic justice. Even today, this story still cracks her up.4. Parent the child you’ve gotThe apartment my parents raised us in had nothing resembling a glass table. We had very little in our lives that was delicate or breakable at all. It’s true that we couldn’t afford anything too fancy, but it’s also true that in the wake of her own upbringing, my mother had no interest in owning showpieces of any sort. At home, Craig and I were permitted to be ourselves. We were respectful of our elders and abided by some general rules, but we also spoke our minds at the dinner table, threw balls indoors, cranked music on the stereo and horsed around on the couch. When something did break – a water glass or a coffee mug or, every once in a while, a window – it was not a big deal.I tried to carry this same approach into my parenting of Sasha and Malia. I wanted them to feel both seen and heard – to always voice their thoughts and to never feel like they had to tiptoe in their own home. Barack and I established basic rules and governing principles for our household: like my mom, I had our kids making their beds as soon as they were old enough to sleep in beds. Like his mom, Barack was all about getting the girls interested early in the pleasure provided by books.What we learned quickly, however, was that raising little kids followed the same basic trajectory we’d experienced with both pregnancy and childbirth: you can spend a lot of time dreaming, preparing and planning for family life to go perfectly, but, in the end, you’re pretty much just left to deal with whatever happens. You can establish systems and routines, anoint your various sleep, feeding and disciplinary gurus from the staggering variety that exist. You can write your family bylaws and declare your religion and your philosophy out loud, but, at some point, sooner rather than later, you will almost surely be brought to your knees, realising that despite your best and most earnest efforts, you are only marginally – and sometimes very marginally – in control. Here’s a story I’m not necessarily proud of. It happened one evening when we still lived in Chicago, when Malia was about seven and Sasha was just four. I was home after a long day of work. As was often the case in those days, Barack was across the country in Washington DC, in the middle of a Senate session that I was probably feeling resentful of. I had served the kids dinner, asked how their days had gone, supervised bath time, and was now cleaning up the last of the dishes, sagging a little on my feet, desperate to be off duty and find even just a half hour to sit quietly by myself.The girls were supposed to be brushing their teeth for bed, but I could hear them running up and down the stairs to our third-floor playroom, giggling wildly as they went.“Hey, Malia, Sasha, it’s time to wind down!” I called from the foot of the stairs.“Now!”There was a brief pause – three whole seconds, maybe – and then more thundering footsteps, another shriek of laughter.“It’s time to settle down!” I yelled again.Yet it was clear I was shouting into the void, fully disregarded by my own kids. I could feel the heat starting to rise in my cheeks, my patience disintegrating, my steam building up, my stack preparing to blow. All I wanted, in the whole wide world, was for those children to go to bed.Since the time I was a kid myself, my mom had always advised me to try to count to 10 in moments like these, to pause just long enough that you might grab on to some reason – to respond rather than react. I think I got as far as counting to eight before I couldn’t stand it another second. I was angry. I ran up the stairs and shouted for the girls to come down from the playroom and join me on the landing. I then took a breath and counted the last two seconds, trying to quell my rage.When the girls appeared, the two of them in their pyjamas, flushed and a little sweaty from the fun they’d been having, I told them I quit. I was resigning from the job of being their mother.I summoned what little calm I could find in myself and said: “Look, you don’t listen to me. You seem to think you don’t need a mother. You seem perfectly happy to be in charge of yourselves, so go right ahead … You can feed and dress yourselves from now on. And you can get yourselves to bed. I am handing you your own little lives and you can manage them yourselves. I don’t care.” I threw my hands in the air, showing them how helpless and hurt I felt. “I am done,” I said. It was in this moment that I got one of my life’s clearest looks at who I was dealing with.Malia’s eyes grew wide, her lower lip starting to tremble. “Oh, Mommy,” she said, “I don’t want that to happen.” And she promptly hustled off to the bathroom to brush her teeth.Something in me relaxed. Wow, I thought, that sure worked fast.Four-year-old Sasha, meanwhile, stood clutching the little blue blankie she liked to carry around, taking a second to process the news of my resignation before landing on her own emotional response, which was pure and unfettered relief.No sooner had her sister shuffled obediently off, Sasha turned without a word and scampered back upstairs to the playroom, as if to say, Finally! This lady is out of my business! Within seconds, I heard her flip on the TV.In a moment of deep fatigue and frustration, I’d handed that child the keys to her own life, and it turned out she was plenty happy to take them, long before she was actually ready to. Much as I liked my mom’s idea about eventually becoming obsolete in my kids’ lives, it was far too early to quit. (I promptly called Sasha back down from the playroom, marched her through the tooth-brushing, and put her to bed.)This one episode provided me with an important lesson about how to proceed with my children. I had one who wanted more guardrails from her parents and one who wanted fewer, one who would respond first to my emotions and another who would take my words at face value.Each kid had her own temperament, her own sensitivities, her own needs, strengths and ways of interpreting the world around her. Barack and I would see these same dynamics manifest over and over again in our children as they grew. On the ski slopes, Malia would make measured, precise turns while Sasha preferred to bomb straight downhill. If you asked how Sasha’s day at school had been, she’d answer with five words before bouncing off to her bedroom, whereas Malia would offer a detailed breakdown of every hour she’d spent away. Malia often sought our advice – like her dad, she likes to make decisions with input – whereas Sasha thrived, just as I once had as a kid, when we trusted her to do her own thing. Neither was right or wrong, good or bad. They were – and are – simply different.In the end, the child you have will grow into the person they’re meant to be. They will learn life their own way. You will control some but definitely not all of how it goes for them. You can’t remove unhappiness from their lives. You won’t remove struggle. What you can give your kids is the opportunity to be heard and seen, the practice they need to make rational decisions based on meaningful values, and the consistency of your gladness that they are there.5. Come home. We will always like you hereMy mother said this to me and Craig not just once, but often. It’s the one message that stood out above all else. You came home to be liked. Home was where you would always find gladness.I recognise that, for many folks, “home” can be a more complicated, less comfortable idea. It may represent a place, or set of people, or type of emotional experience that you are trying to move past. Home could well be a painful spot to which you never want to return. And that is OK. There’s power in knowing where you don’t want to go. You may need to courageously remake your idea of home, fostering the parts of your flame that may have gone unrecognised when you yourself were a child. You may need to cultivate a chosen family rather than a biological one, protecting the boundaries that keep you safe. My mom moved (yes, kicking and screaming) to Washington with us, in part to help with our kids, but also in part because I needed her gladness. I am nothing but a grown-up child myself, someone who at the end of a long day comes through the door feeling worn out and a little needy, looking for solace and acceptance and maybe a snack.In her wise and plain-spoken way, my mother built us all up. She lit up for us every day, so that we could in turn light up for others. She helped make the White House feel less like a museum and more like a home. During those eight years, Barack and I tried to throw open the doors of that home to more people, of more races and backgrounds, and particularly to more children, inviting them in to touch the furniture and explore what was there. We wanted it to feel like a palace of gladness, telegraphing one simple, powerful message: We will always like you here.Mom will take no credit for any of it, of course. She’ll be the first to tell you – still – that she’s nothing special, and it’s never been about her, anyway.Late in 2016, about a month before a new president was sworn in, my mother happily packed her bags. There was little fanfare and, at her insistence, no farewell party. She just moved out of the White House and went back to Chicago, returning to her place on Euclid Avenue, to her old bed and old belongings, pleased that she’d gotten the job done. TopicsMichelle ObamaBarack ObamaUS politicsParents and parentingFamilyWomenGrandparents and grandparentingextractsReuse this content More

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      After the long wait, US parents seeking under-5s’ vaccine face yet more hurdles

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      After the long wait, US parents seeking under-5s’ vaccine face yet more hurdlesSome local officials are unsure of how to order Covid vaccines or when they will arrive, while others are aiming to ignore federal guidelines completely Ashley Comegys, a parent of two young children in Florida, was ecstatic when the Covid vaccines were authorized for children above the age of six months in the US. “We’ve been waiting for this for so long,” she said. “We can finally start to spread our wings again.”But then she learned that Florida had missed two deadlines to preorder vaccines and would not make them available through state and local health departments, delaying the rollout by several weeks and significantly limiting access.“Rage does not adequately describe how I felt that they were basically inhibiting me from being able to make a choice to protect my children,” Comegys said.Families with young kids encountered months of delays after the pediatric trials were expanded and regulators pushed back meetings in order to evaluate the data closely. Vaccines for adults were rolled out a year and a half ago.Now new challenges to vaccinating some of America’s youngest are cropping up.“I called probably 20 pharmacies and pediatricians in our area” – including across the state line, said Sheryl Peters, a parent of an 18-month-old and a four-year-old in Tennessee.Even after the vaccines were authorized for this age group, her local health officials didn’t know when they would arrive, and they directed her to the state health department, who told her it would be a few weeks, she said. She was crying on the phone, begging for help, but “nobody knew anything,” she said. “It was so, so disorganized.”-While Tennessee did pre-order vaccines, the rollout has been slow and complicated. And the confusion could deepen.Four Republican lawmakers in Tennessee are petitioning the governor, Bill Lee, to ignore the federal recommendations on vaccinating children under five and to ban state health departments from “distributing, promoting or recommending” the vaccines, creating uncertainty in the state’s approach to vaccinating some of its youngest residents.Tennessee stopped all vaccination outreach to teens – not just around the Covid vaccines – in 2021.The actions by leaders in states like Florida and Tennessee may contribute to existing hesitancy some families feel toward the vaccines, as well as hampering efforts to vaccinate children across the states – particularly those who have been marginalized in the health system, who are also at higher risk of getting sick.“Departments of health, by and large, assist people who don’t have insurance or are on Medicaid or don’t have access to healthcare or live in rural areas where there are no providers,” said Michelle Fiscus, a pediatrician and Tennessee’s former top vaccines official who was fired in July 2021 after promoting vaccines. She was “absolutely furious” to read the lawmakers’ request for a ban.“For an elected body and a governor in a state who has continued to beat the drum of everybody can make their own choice, whether it’s about wearing a mask or gathering in a church or getting a vaccine, to decide for these parents that they are no longer going to have access to these vaccines is really antithetical to everything that they have been preaching,” Fiscus said.“Everything has always been, ‘It’s your choice. You don’t have to quarantine or isolate – it’s your choice. You don’t have to wear a mask – it’s your choice. You don’t have to stay away – it’s your choice.’ But when it comes to getting a vaccine that can actually save lives and prevent hospitalization, then they’re going to make the decision to take that choice away from you.”That’s been one of the hardest parts about this process for Comegys.“If you don’t want to get vaccinated, if you don’t want to mask, OK,” she said. “You can choose that. But why do you then get to make that choice for my family and the way that we want to protect our kids? It doesn’t feel fair.”Some officials continue to spread the narrative that kids aren’t affected by Covid, Fiscus said, even after more than 440 deaths and thousands of hospitalizations among children under five.In March, Florida’s department of health recommended against Covid vaccines for all healthy children. Florida is “affirmatively against the Covid vaccine for young kids”, DeSantis said at a press conference on 16 June, despite ample evidence of the vaccines’ safety and efficacy.The Biden administration soon announced that Florida “reversed course” and would allow doctors to order vaccines directly. State officials disputed the idea of a pivot, saying doctors were already allowed to order the vaccines on their own, but doctors pointed out that the portal to do so was not in place until after the initial shipments had already gone out to every other state.“The state of Florida intentionally missed multiple deadlines to order vaccines to protect its youngest kids,” said Dr Ashish K Jha, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator.With the delays and the confusion, many doctors and health systems haven’t received doses yet.Only federally qualified health centers and pharmacies participating in the national pharmacy program could order vaccines directly in Florida. But most pharmacies can only vaccinate kids three and older, leaving significant access gaps for younger children. (CVS can administer the vaccine to kids as young as 18 months through its Minute Clinic.) And some opted out entirely, with the grocery chain Publix announcing it will not offer the vaccine to children under five through its pharmacies.In Tennessee, Lee has not yet signaled whether he is considering limiting the vaccines. And even if vaccinations and information isn’t limited in Tennessee, the lawmakers’ request could add to hesitancy around the vaccines.“That seems to be their goal, to continue to spread vaccine misinformation and disinformation and to continue to erode confidence around these vaccines,” Fiscus said.In Florida, vaccinations will probably stall amid the message that Covid vaccines for kids aren’t recommended and the confusion around how to find them, especially because Florida isn’t offering the pediatric vaccines at state and local health departments and because pharmacies usually only vaccinate kids above the age of three.“I genuinely don’t know, if you have a child under three, where you will go for that here if your pediatrician’s not getting it,” Comegys said. “Unless you’re on top of it, it’s going to be really hard to find.”Many pediatricians in her area are short-staffed and aren’t able to reach out to families to let them know the vaccines have been authorized and how to get them.Her pediatrician was able to place an order for the under-five vaccines a week ago, but it’s going to take several weeks before they arrive. Her two children were placed on the waitlist.It’s been difficult to know the vaccines are rolling out in other states while her family still can’t access them, Comegys said. “The fact that it is available, and I can’t access it – that’s where I get really angry and really upset.”Families that want to vaccinate their kids are eager to get the shots as soon as possible, as the US faces another potential wave from the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, and with the return to school rapidly approaching.But many families feel like they put their lives on hold while much of the rest of the world moved on. Peters had a family cruise planned for May that they canceled because the shots weren’t available yet, while Comegys is canceling a vacation planned for July.“The finish line has been so close,” Comegys said. “And then to hear, ‘Oh no, it’s going to be another couple of weeks or a couple of months.’ I’m so angry. We’re so close, and now you’re not going to let me get there.”TopicsCoronavirusVaccines and immunisationFloridaParents and parentingUS politicsHealthFamilynewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it

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      ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it For Black women in Congress, maternal mortality hits close to home. The Black Maternal Health Caucus seeks changeWhen Alma Adams’s daughter complained of abdominal pain during a difficult pregnancy, her doctor overlooked her cries for help. The North Carolina congresswoman’s daughter had to undergo a last-minute caesarean section. She and her baby daughter, now 16, survived. “It could have gone another way. I could have been a mother who was grieving her daughter and granddaughter,” Adams told the Guardian, following a week in which the White House highlighted the crisis of pregnancy-related deaths among Black women. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black women die at three times the rate of white women.For Adams and other Black women in Congress, who formed the Black Maternal Health Caucus, the issue hits close to home. Last week, during Black Maternal Health Week, they talked about how their experiences and the work of advocates had propelled legislation, known as the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021, to fight a healthcare crisis that disproportionately affects Black women regardless of income.The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries. Since 2000, the maternal mortality rate has risen nearly 60%, making it worse now than it was decades earlier. More than half of these deaths are preventable.Health experts point to the fact that other industrialized countries have significantly different approaches to motherhood than the US, including paid maternity leave, access to comprehensive postpartum care and enough maternity care providers, especially midwives, to meet the needs of their populations. Policy advocates add that the crisis among Black women is a symptom of racism in the nation’s healthcare system – from who has access to care to attitudes toward Black people and their bodies.“It doesn’t matter what your socioeconomic status is. It doesn’t matter how much insurance you have, or how much education you have,” Adams said, adding that her daughter, Jeanelle Lindsay, had a master’s degree and health insurance. “Those things don’t matter. This could happen to anyone. Look at women like Beyoncé and Serena Williams, who had these near misses because the doctors really didn’t pay the kind of attention that they should have.”Black women in the House used the week of recognition to bring attention to several bills that are part of a sweeping Momnibus package to address the dangers of birthing while Black. Their efforts to elevate the longtime work of organizations such as the Black Mamas Matter Alliance showed the power of representation in putting issues affecting Black women on the congressional agenda, said Lauren Underwood, an Illinois congresswoman and registered nurse.“It takes women in these spaces to call out problems, set an agenda, and bring together a coalition of legislators, advocates, and community members to work toward comprehensive, evidence-based solutions that will save moms’ lives,” Underwood said in an email.In January 2019, after Underwood received her committee assignments, Adams met with her to see if she wanted to launch a caucus focused on Black maternal health. One of Underwood’s friends, an epidemiologist at the CDC, had died three weeks after she gave birth. “I was still grappling with her death when I came to Congress,” Underwood said.Three months later, they launched the caucus with 53 founding members, including Ayanna Pressley, Lucy McBath and Barbara Lee. Today, it has 115 members from both parties.After consulting with maternal health advocacy groups, Underwood and Adams introduced the Momnibus Act in March 2020, nine bills aimed at combating maternal health disparities through investment in community-based programs and other efforts to rectify social determinants of health – the conditions in which people live, work and grow up – that affect who lives and who dies in childbirth.Their legislative pursuit was timely, coming before a pandemic that would bring racial health disparities to the public’s attention. Between 2019 and 2020, the mortality rate for Black and Latina women and birthing people rose during the first year of the pandemic.Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black and South Asian female vice-president, amplified the issue last week during a speech at the Century Foundation, a progressive thinktank based in Washington DC. Harris called for “building a future in which being Black and pregnant is a time filled with joy and hope rather than fear”.As a US senator from California, Harris was lead sponsor for the Senate version of the Momnibus Act in 2020, which stalled in committee. Underwood and Adams, along with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, reintroduced the Momnibus bill in February 2021.Most of the proposals in the package are included in the Build Back Better Act, a social spending bill that is stuck in gridlock.“Were it not for Black women in the Congressional Black Caucus, there would not be a Black Maternal Health Caucus,” said the Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley. “When we say that we are the voice of Congress, we mean that.”Pressley lost her paternal grandmother, whom she never knew, when she died giving birth to Pressley’s uncle in the 1950s. “Decades later, the Black maternal mortality crisis continues to rob us of our loved ones and to destabilize families,” she said during the Century Foundation event.What explains the disparities in outcomes between Black and white mothers boils down to what Pressley called “policy violence”. It’s not just the discrimination that Black women and birthing people experience, but also the lack of access to quality healthcare and medical coverage.“These are the result of centuries of laws in a systematic, systematically racist health care system that too often discounts our pay, ignores our voices, disregards our lives,” Pressley said. “Birthing while Black should not be a death sentence.”In November 2021, Joe Biden signed into law one of the bills in the Momnibus package that invests $15m in maternity care for veterans. But other legislative efforts remain stalled in Congress. Eight bills that were part of the original Momnibus package are part of the Build Back Better Act, according to a tracker by The Century Foundation. They include awarding grants to community organizations to help pregnant people find affordable housing, documenting transportation barriers for pregnant and postpartum people, expanding food stamp eligibility and permanently expanding Medicaid coverage for mothers in every state for a year after childbirth.And on Friday, Booker and seven other lawmakers introduced Mamas First Act, which would expand Medicaid to cover services from doulas and midwives.“We’ve made historic progress, from the enactment of the first bill in my Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act to the recent cabinet meeting Vice-President Harris led, the first-ever White House cabinet meeting convened to address maternal health disparities as a national priority,” Underwood said.Adams pointed to another piece of the legislation that feels very close to home: the Kira Johnson Act, named after a 39-year-old Black mother who, after complaining of abdominal pain, died in 2016 from a hemorrhage following a routine caesarean section. The bill would direct the health and human services department to send grants to community groups focused on improving the maternal health outcomes for Black, Latino and other marginalized communities and for training to reduce racial bias and discrimination among healthcare providers.The connection between Johnson’s and her daughter’s situations resonated with Adams. The pain they experienced was dismissed – a familiar form of racial bias that the Momnibus package attempts to address.“Either you have a mother, you are a mother, or you know women who are moms,” Adams said. “When we raise the tide for Black women, who are among the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, we ultimately raise the tide for all women.”TopicsUS CongressParents and parentingFamilyKamala HarrisAyanna PressleyHouse of RepresentativesUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More

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      A day after giving birth, I was asked back to work. America needs paid family leave | Bobbi Dempsey

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      A day after giving birth, I was asked back to work. America needs paid family leaveBobbi DempseyThe US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among developed countries. Yet Senator Joe Manchin struggles to understand why paid family leave is important Twenty-four hours after I gave birth to my second child, my employer called to ask when I planned to return to work.It had been a high-risk pregnancy and a complicated, precarious delivery involving a breech birth. I should have remained in the hospital for several days. But my oldest child – then just a year old – needed major surgery that couldn’t be delayed. So we brought our newborn home and rushed to prepare to leave for a hospital two hours away where our oldest child would have surgery while our newborn was at home being cared for by relatives.As we gathered our things, the phone rang. It was someone from the HR office at the paper bag factory where I worked. After briefly making the obligatory inquiry as to how my new baby was doing, the HR rep got to the real reason for her call.“So, we know you were planning to take a few weeks off, but I just wanted to make sure you knew that you can come back anytime now. I could even get you back on the schedule this weekend, if you wanted.” After a brief pause, she added, “I figured, you know, you might want to start getting paid again.”I got the message loud and clear.My employer provided no paid maternity leave, so the longer I was off from work, the longer I would go without income. With two young children to support and medical bills piling up, this was money I desperately needed. By dangling a paycheck in front of me, the HR rep knew she was making it very tempting for me to return to work sooner than I had planned – and way sooner than I should.That was in the early 1990s, in a rural area in the coal region of Pennsylvania, where I live. I doubt much has changed since then.The version of the Build Back Better plan passed by the House on 19 November includes a provision for paid family leave. While it would mandate only four weeks of paid time off – much less than the 12 weeks in the original plan – it is being heralded as a big victory, which is depressing. Even worse: there’s a good chance that even that minimal amount of paid family leave won’t survive in the final version of the bill.At least, not if Joe Manchin has his way. The West Virginia senator has voiced his opposition to any paid family leave in the bill, and the Democrats need his critical vote to pass the package in the Senate.It’s incomprehensible that one individual could single-handedly decide the fate of something that affects so many American families. Manchin has never had to endure the physical and mental agony of returning to work before you’ve recovered from childbirth. His family is wealthy and has likely benefited from the support of nannies, assistants and paid daycare. I’m guessing he has never known the panic of worrying you might lose your job – or not have enough in your paycheck to pay essential bills – because you need to miss work to care for a sick child or handle a family emergency.It’s stunning that one man who has never needed paid leave has the ability to keep it from millions of parents who do. Manchin seems to be enjoying the power trip, relishing the attention his cat-and-mouse game has attracted. But for many people – particularly postpartum mothers – this is no game. The ability to take even just a few precious weeks at home without fear of financial losses could literally be a matter of life and death.Like many industrial employers (at least at that time), the factory where I worked used a point system to track and regulate employee absences. When you took a day off – unpaid, of course – it didn’t matter if you were sick, taking a vacation, or attending to a sick relative or family emergency. It was all treated the same way. You were given a point for each absence. After five points, you were given a warning. At six points, a one-day suspension without pay. If you reached seven points, you were fired. I received a point after absences for each of my appointments for prenatal care, and another for the time I missed while having the baby.It’s inexcusable that American companies are allowed to operate like this. Among the handful of countries without any form of national paid leave, the United States is by far the largest and richest.Forcing people to choose between their paycheck and their families or their own physical health is heartless. In the case of someone who has just given birth, it is particularly cruel – and dangerous. I suffered serious (and potentially life-threatening) complications during and after each of my pregnancies. I am far from unusual. The US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world among developed countries – and the risk is especially high for black and Native American women and women in poor rural areas. Workers in these communities are also more likely to receive little or no paid leave from their employers.Only roughly one in five workers in the US has access to paid family leave. The rest are forced to make impossible and risky choices. One in four new mothers returns to work within two weeks of giving birth. I know firsthand that is not nearly long enough to recover.Even looking at it purely from an economic and labor standpoint, a national paid leave policy makes sense. Paid leave actually keeps people in their jobs in the long run. When parents don’t have even the bare minimum of paid leave available for emergencies, they may be forced to quit their job – or end up getting fired.While paid family leave could make a big difference to new parents, they aren’t the only ones who benefit. Paid leave can also be extremely beneficial to people in the “sandwich generation” situation – which is exactly where I am now. About 44 million Americans provide care to parents or other adult relatives or friends, representing 37bn hours of unpaid labor each year.Providing a basic minimum of paid family leave to all Americans shouldn’t be controversial – and definitely shouldn’t seem like such an impossible goal.
      Bobbi Dempsey is a freelance writer specializing in topics related to poverty, a reporting fellow at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and an economic justice fellow at Community Change
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionDemocratsJoe ManchinFamilycommentReuse this content More

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      After a lifetime in the background, Huma Abedin steps forward | Podcast

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      As Hillary Clinton’s most trusted aide, it was her job to stay out of view. Even when her husband Anthony Weiner’s scandalous behaviour dragged her into the spotlight, she mostly stayed silent. In this interview, Huma Abedin explains why she is ready to tell her own story, in a new memoir that sheds remarkable light on what it cost her to become a public figure against her will

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      When Huma Abedin joined Hillary Clinton’s team in the White House as an intern in 1996, she could not have imagined she would still be working for the same boss, as her most trusted and intimate aide, a quarter of a century later. But that is far from the most surprising aspect of Abedin’s story. In this episode, she talks to Nosheen Iqbal about the extraordinary upbringing that took her from Kalamazoo in Michigan to Saudi Arabia, and what it meant to be the Muslim daughter of an Indian father and a Pakistani mother working in Washington. She reflects on the privileges and costs of working at the centre of political power at such a young age, always having to choose between family and friends, and the job that turned into a vocation. And she talks frankly about her marriage to Anthony Weiner, whose scandalous and ultimately criminal behaviour made her a household name against her will. “I never wanted to be the story, or be part of the story. I didn’t even want to be in the picture,” she says. “So to be elevated in this way … yes, shame is the word.” Throughout all of the crises that arose from Weiner’s behaviour – up to and including a huge and arguably terminal blow to Clinton’s campaign for the presidency – Abedin either stayed silent or spoke in brief, carefully constructed statements, even as she found herself hounded by the paparazzi or splashed across the front pages. Now she has written a memoir – and, she says, she has found huge strength in telling her story in her own words. “I know I have been judged; I know I will continue to be judged,” she says. “But it feels amazing, I have to say.” • Read an extract from the book “If Hillary Clinton loses this election, it will be because of you and me” here. • Huma Abedin’s memoir, Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, is published by Simon & Schuster at £20. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Archive: NBC; CBS; Clinton Library; CNN; ABC; AP; VOA News; C-Span More

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      I’m a gig worker with zero parental leave. Even four weeks off would make a huge difference

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      Parents and parentingI’m a gig worker with zero parental leave. Even four weeks off would make a huge differenceAs US politicians argue over paid time off for parents, workers like me are forced to keep working while caring for children Andrew Lawrence@by_drewMon 8 Nov 2021 06.00 ESTLast modified on Mon 8 Nov 2021 12.21 ESTNine months ago I was not yet a bleary-eyed dad juggling work and two baby boys, but I did know a second baby was imminent. What should’ve been a happy milestone was quickly blunted by a boomeranging lament – that there would be no taking any paid parental leave for me, a gig worker.When my first was born, just before the pandemic, I was a freelance writer in the throes of an MFA program. My wife decided it was more cost-effective to stay home with our son than return to work; soon after Covid forced everyone inside, local daycare options vanished.And even though our son was thriving in preschool and my work wasn’t drastically affected by stay-at-home precautions, a second child – blessing and all – was still a nervous endeavor that was going to demand so much more of me. Still, for all of my agita about the challenge ahead, I was still well equipped. I write from anywhere (the kid’s room, the car), keep odd hours and that flexibility meshes well with diaper changes, school runs and bedtime stories. I can stay on the grind and contribute at home. I’m fortunate, sure, but I’m still killing myself to live. And it’s not just me.Working American parents are stretched thinner than ever. In the past half-century the share of working moms has jumped from 51% to 72%, according to Pew Research; almost half of two-parent families include two full-time working parents. And yet despite this trend toward balanced parenting the US remains the glaring exception among 41 resourceful countries that offer a national paid parental leave mandate. A 2019 congressional survey estimated 16% of private-sector workers qualified for family leave, and even then a recent Ball State University study found that only 5% of new dads take two or more weeks of leave. The figures are even more discouraging when you zero in on race. And yet there’s no question that part-time workers – 11% of whom have access to family leave, according to the Department of Labor – have it hardest. In a country that is increasingly pivoting toward a gig economy, this patchy social safety net should be an acute concern.Only nine states and Washington DC mandate paternity leave – and even then it isn’t paid. The Family and Medical Leave Act gives parents unpaid leave for public agency workers and employees who have worked at least one year at private companies with at least 50 employees. That’s even as the benefits of paid leave have been well established for decades – most obviously in kids who grow up to be happy and self-assured. But paid family leave is good for the economy too, as workers with access are much more likely to return to their jobs and strengthen the overall labor force.You’d think a president whose origin story derives from his being there for his kids after his wife and infant daughter were tragically killed in a car accident would have an easier time making a case for paid family leave. But it had been a sticking point in Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill, with the terms going from 12 weeks to four weeks to out entirely (for Dino Senator Joe Manchin) to back in the fold when the bill narrowly survived a House vote last Friday. The haggling persisted even as Ball State researchers also found that 86% Americans supported some form of paid family leave, with participants on average pushing for 13 months off. When the Atlanta Braves utility player Ehire Adrianza took paternity leave before game six of the World Series, Braves fans mostly cheered – probably because it didn’t cost them the championship.Of course some will find demands for paid family leave laughable, especially coming from a parent who didn’t push. Last month Joe Lonsdale, a smirking tech venture capitalist and father of three, gaslit the Twitterverse after pronouncing any prominent man who takes six months off with his newborn was “a loser”. It was a not-so-subtle jab at the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, who continues to draw harsh criticism for exploiting the 12 weeks of paid parental leave he receives from the federal government after he and his partner, Chasten, welcomed twins in September. “This idea that both parents should get maternity and paternity leave at the same time is a little weird,” quipped Joe Rogan, also a father of three, on a recent podcast episode.Allow Instagram content?This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click ‘Allow and continue’.Allow and continueBut then again that figures. Rogan just scored a $100m deal from Spotify – which, incidentally, offers its employees six months of paid parental leave regardless of gender. (“And we strongly urge you to take it,” the company tells prospective workers.) Lonsdale and Rogan’s considerable fortunes don’t just buy home help on demand. (Tellingly, Ball State researchers found high-income-earning fathers were most likely to take leave.) It assumes not just that moms must bear the majority of infant caregiving, but also that they don’t need or aren’t deserving of undivided physical or emotional postpartum support. It assumes that same-sex parents can’t be overwhelmed, too. And it assumes childbirth to be a fairly straightforward affair.It dismisses the mounting challenges for women who choose to start their families after 35 (the start line for “geriatric” pregnancies), and altogether overlooks the childbirthing risks for black women – who are four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Beyoncé, Serena Williams and Allyson Felix have been candid about their struggles. Meghan Markle, who has been just as open about her own pregnancy trials, made personal appeals to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Given the broad, bipartisan public support for paid family leave, it’s especially galling that pro-choice championing, family values-espousing conservatives and progressive Democrats were so obstinate about this. Even four paid weeks off makes a massive difference for workers like me. My wife and I committed to a home delivery. As we inched closer to the due date I promised to begin winding down my workload, but as a creative contractor running a small business, that’s easier said than done – and then not done at all when work got really nuts. The further we sailed past our due date, the more the frustration built. Ten days later I was finally forced to hit the pause button when the baby arrived and was immediately rushed to the hospital. While he lay in a NICU bed, there was still a toddler back home who’d be waking up any minute expecting a wardrobe change and a hot breakfast. If it weren’t for family rushing in from out of state and the profound generosity of so many friends and neighbors, I don’t know how we’d have made it through. Finally, just before Halloween, we brought the baby home to a hero’s welcome; his brother, dressed as Iron Man with hands outstretched, shouting “Gimme!” A baby in the hospital, Tony Stark back home, pets to feed, dishes to wash – this is a heaping plate in the best of times, let alone with the extra pressure of urgent work deadlines. But for the moment gig workers and small business owners who survive by eating what they kill have no choice but to press ahead with their jobs and react to the new additions to the family as they come. Now comes the hard part: reconfiguring routines, redrawing responsibilities, reckoning with the increased diaper flow, setting up the rest of the nursery – when all I’d rather do is take a nap. In a world where paid family leave is the norm it’s past the time the US did better by its working parents. TopicsParents and parentingFamilyUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More