Mother’s Day, Covid, Gun Violence, Gray Divorce, Falling Births, Republican Obstructionism, Amnesty International

Belated Mother’s Day wishes to any and all mothers who may be reading this. I still miss my own mother, who died in 2006. (I appear with her on the last blog posting.)

A world champion in the motherhood category is a woman in Mali, already with a daughter, who gave birth to 9 babies without having used any fertility drugs, so she said. If all the babies survive, they will shatter the previous record of 8 for simultaneous live births. Fortunately, the fame of multiple births does help parents afford to raise so many offspring.  Malian woman gives birth to nine babies, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56994408

Doctora Jeanette, a retired doctor in El Triunfo, Honduras, tells me: “People here are all getting sick and dying of Covid. We still have no vaccines! God willing, we will see you back here again before too long.”

Another mass shooting at a party in Colorado has left 7 people dead. Not even a private gathering is now safe. Where is the NRA’s “good guy with a gun” who supposedly protects us all? Current lax gun laws are an open invitation to violence.

A 6th-grade girl shooter in Idaho wounded 3 people before being disarmed. Gun shootings and killings by females are relatively rare compared to those perpetrated by males. The reasons are probably both cultural and hormonal (related to male testosterone levels). That the Idaho shooter was a girl was duly noted as something quite out of the ordinary.

Package thieves in our neighborhood have become epidemic. Thieves follow delivery trucks around to snatch up the packages before you can even open the door to retrieve them. It’s probably the same in other cities. Some folks have cameras to film the action and, in our area, post them on the neighborhood website, which should help identify the culprits if they can ever be caught. I suspect they have lots of stuff they may not even want piled up in their homes.

Bill and Melinda Gates’ surprising announcement of their divorce after a long marriage, not so long after the Bezos also ended their marriage, shows that even achieving great wealth together and apparent agreement on how to use it are not sufficient to keep a couple together, even after raising children to adulthood while also establishing a productive partnership in philanthropy. Are Bill, who's 65, and Melinda, who's 56, maybe just a normal couple after all? As the stigma surrounding divorce has eroded, the divorce rate for Americans 50 and older has doubled since the 1990s. Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos were 55 and 49 when they divorced. Al and Tipper Gore split up while in their 60s. In many, perhaps most, cases of “gray divorce,” it’s the man who has a sexual/romantic relationship outside the marriage, hinted at as a possible factor in the Gates’ split. A new partner is usually more exciting and alluring than a long-time, overly familiar spouse. As women age, they traditionally lose their appeal to men while any surviving guy becomes an increasingly scarce and hot commodity among women. Men on average die earlier, so fewer of them, relatively speaking, remain alive as the years goes by. If a man is also well-off financially, his appeal to both young and older women escalates. Speaking for myself as a single woman now in my 80s, while my current romantic prospects look pretty slim, that was not the case when I was younger. Even in my 40’s with 4 kids, I had serious suitors back then. Now older men tend to pair off with ever younger women. Besides the sheer scarcity of available, suitable, and attractive older single men, another consideration for mature women entering the dating game is the prospect of future illness and end of life care with a new male partner, who is apt to be even older than she is. It’s one thing for a woman to care for a man in his last days after they’ve spent many years together, another if she only comes into his life near his decline and death.

After my own marriage ended after 24 years of what seemed like a strong partnership (my ex-husband soon remarried, yes, to a younger woman) and now seeing friends also married for many years questioning whether to remain together, I wonder if our longer lifespan has extended marriage perhaps too long? In today’s marriages, husband and wife do not have the traditional gender division of labor that once made spouses dependent on each other. Fewer Americans are getting married at all now and the average marriage lasts only about 8 years. Odds that a given marriage will end in divorce are estimated at between 40 and 50%, rather sobering to contemplate when raising a celebratory toast to the bride and groom.

What public policies might encourage the duration of marriage? And since the US birthrate has plunged and now has reached its lowest point in 50 years, to sustain our population, more support may be especially needed for young families. The Biden administration is trying to offer that in its American Families Plan. What else might encourage the birth of more children to keep the future economy afloat? Perhaps family leave for both parents with the birth of a child? (While not the norm in real life, most ads for baby products show dad, not mom, changing, feeding, or bathing the baby.)

With more women now working outside the home, childcare is increasingly important, so Senator Elizabeth Warren is championing the cause of affordable care. If a woman is nursing a newborn (good for both mother and child and for their bond), it would also be advisable, in my opinion, to incentivize new mothers to spend at least the first 6 months at home with their new infant, perhaps working from home in our post-pandemic world.

There is concern now that too few babies are being born in the US to support future retirees. With fertility controllable to a large extent and with women expecting to be in the workforce, it’s logical that they would have fewer offspring. Most younger women I know have only one or two children, if any. Perhaps economic incentives and support can help reverse this trend, although young married mothers of my acquaintance vow that going through pregnancy twice is their absolute limit. Immigrant women seem open to having larger families, so if policy makers are worried, more immigrants should be admitted, not only to assure the future workforce, but to provide immigrant adults to bolster it right now.

Donald Trump is a dad who never changed a diaper. In fact, he is reported to have avoided engaging at all with his kids until they’d finished high school. Reputedly, he only “allowed” Melania to get pregnant when she promised to keep her figure.

Even after six months, Mr. Trump continues to settle scores and promote the false narrative that he actually won the 2020 election. His minority vote victory in 2016 was due to a rare fluke in the Electoral College system unlikely to be repeated—which it was not. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called out Trump apologists parroting his favorite line of “people are saying,” by asking “What people”? Republican Congressman Adam Kinziner of Illinois contends that few of his Republican colleagues really believe Trump won, but are afraid that Trump’s followers, aroused by exhortations from the man himself, will vote against them in the primary if they admit it. That’s a genuine fear, since many Trump supporters still find it easy to believe that he actually did win because they and everyone else they know voted for him. Recently, in West Va., I saw Trump yard signs still on display. Meanwhile, hell bent on fomenting mischief, Trump and his allies have ganged up on Liz Cheney, furthering a split within the Republican Party and blocking any semblance of bipartisanship. Minority leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to oppose any and all proposals from the Biden administration “one hundred percent.” No longer are Republican elected officials even pretending to promote bipartisanship, the common good, and constituent wellbeing, or even to tell the truth, only to score political points and survive in office. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senator Lindsey Graham have argued that the Republican Party cannot get along without Trump, which may be true in the short-term. But Cheney, a staunch conservative, realizes that the Republican Party cannot win long-term by denying the integrity of elections and by failing to emerge from Donald Trump’s sweaty grip.  

North Carolina’s 20-week abortion ban challenged in federal court

More than a dozen states have similar laws restricting abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. (Washington Post. May 7, 2021)

Barring some life-threatening or serious harm to the mother from continuing with the pregnancy beyond that point, 20-weeks seems like a reasonable abortion limit as already stated on this platform. At 20 weeks and thereafter, if the pregnancy cannot continue because of a serious threat to the mother, every effort should be made to preserve the life and health of the child who may then need to be delivered prematurely, rather than euthanized in the womb. (In successive surveys, majority support for “abortion rights” applies only to the first trimester of pregnancy.)

Axios, Amnesty International restores Alexei Navalny's "prisoner of conscience" status, https://www.yahoo.com/news/amnesty-international-restores-alexei-navalnys-152219123.html

Reuters, Amnesty: Yemen's Houthis must release model fearing 'virginity testing', https://www.yahoo.com/news/amnesty-yemens-houthis-must-release-155714250.html

 

In my role as Amnesty International USA’s volunteer chair for the Caribbean, I prepared testimony for the American Friends Service Committee in New Jersey on behalf of a Cuban man in deportation proceedings. He would not fare well back in Cuba, not only because he has lived for many years in the United States, but because his father and brother were well-known human rights activists who had been imprisoned for their advocacy in Cuba. His father was once an Amnesty prisoner of conscience, someone jailed for his peacefully expressed beliefs.

What might the future hold for us, our country, and the world? We are able to predict only immediate and broad outlines. Individuals often envision a fairytale future for themselves after they finally achieve a long-term goal: landing that dream job, marrying the love of their life, buying a new house, having a child, retiring, or, even, getting divorced. But nothing ever turns out quite as expected. Change and challenge are the only constants, which keeping us from ever getting bored. Occupational therapists I’ve worked with over the years have stressed the importance of “purposeful activity” and certainly life’s frequent twists and turns confront us with many challenges and opportunities.