Salon.com > Babies

Children are sexual creatures

Sat, 22 Jun 2013 22:00:00 +0000

In 1985, the founder of modern American sex education gave a controversial speech about erections in fetuses. To Mary Calderone, who had started the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States back in 1964, new evidence about arousal in male fetuses demonstrated once and for all that children were sexual beings.

Nonsense, said conservatives. To critics of sex education, childhood was — or should be — a time of sexual innocence. Racy movies, TV shows and magazines made kids prematurely interested in sex. And so did sex education, which robbed them of their natural virtue and replaced it with tawdry thoughts and feelings.

I thought of this debate as I read the comments by Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, during the House debate on Monday over a bill that would ban almost all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. According to Burgess, fetuses do not simply experience sexual arousal; they actively arouse themselves.

“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” said Burgess, a former obstetrician and gynecologist. “If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?”

Joe Torre’s daughter catches baby after he falls from fire escape

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 16:30:00 +0000

This time it's Cristina Torre, the daughter of former MLB All-Star catcher Joe Torre, whose catching skills are grabbing headlines. ABC 7 reports that on Wednesday night, the younger Torre was at a Brooklyn coffee shop when a distressed man called for help: a 1-year-old boy had crawled onto his building's fire escape.

"The baby was dangling, basically straddling the fire escape," said Torre. He then fell, and Torre's instincts kicked in. "I just put out my arms when I saw him coming down and luckily, he literally landed in my arms, straight on his back," she told ABC 7.

Joe Torre said in a statement that "I am very proud of my daughter Cristina's actions today during an incident in Brooklyn involving a small child. Fortunately for that child she was in the right place at the right time to lend a hand."

The NYPD has charged the parents with negligence.

Breast-feeding is hell

Mon, 27 May 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Breast-feeding is the most natural thing on the planet. A connection between a mother and her offspring. The gift of food and life and love and -- holy hell, is that a blister ON THE TIP OF MY NIPPLE???!!!

Actually, as it turns out, breast-feeding is really f’n hard -- despite the claims of every baby book, blog, doctor, midwife, woman and some men (who always seem to be fans of anything having to do with boobs). Is there a chance that your baby will pop out and land square on your boob, latch perfectly and nourish itself with no problems whatsoever? Yes, of course (and yes, of course, I will want to slap you as a result), but I believe there needs to be a very real shift in expectations among pregnant women when it comes to their breast-feeding capabilities.

As it stands now, we are all told that breast-feeding is the ONLY option for feeding your child if you actually love that child and want them to ever have more than a third-grade-level reading ability. If you don’t breast-feed your baby, you might as well just immediately drop it off at your local prison because that is where it’s going to end up anyway after such a horrible start to its life. Breast-feeding is beautiful and natural and the best and only socially acceptable way to nourish your baby. It is the most natural thing on the planet, you see.

Why all babies say “mama”

Mon, 13 May 2013 16:16:00 +0000

Every language has a word for water. In Swahili they call it maji. In Dutch Danish, it's vand. The Japanese say mizu. Even though these words describe the most common and plentiful life-giving substance on Earth, they have nothing in common linguistically. But why should they, evolving as they did on three separate continents among people with incredibly diverse histories and traditions?

But there is a word, and only one, spoken the same way in nearly every language known to humankind. That word, of course, is "mama."

"Mama" is a universal word, describing the woman who gave us the most cherished love in our most vulnerable state. Almost every language boasts a recognizable form of it. While it's true that most languages vary when it comes to the formal word mother, the intimate mama stays the same in each language.

But "mama" doesn't spring from love. It happens because of two things: Lazy little baby mouths, and boobs.

“Star Trek’s” Wil Wheaton tells newborn girl why being a nerd “is awesome”

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:24:00 +0000

In a panel at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo on April 27, "Star Trek" and "Big Bang Theory" actor Wil Wheaton fielded a question from an audience member, who asked him to explain to her newborn daughter "why it's awesome to be a nerd." Wheaton launched into nearly four-minute speech on growing up feeling like "there was something wrong" and then realizing, as an adult, that being a nerd is something to be valued.

It's "not about what you love -- it's about how you love it" and "finding other people who love it the way you do" is the defining characteristic of "why being a nerd is awesome," said Wheaton.

Kate Middleton to have a girl?

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:32:00 +0000

The media continues to grasp at straws in an effort to determine the sex of Kate Middleton and Prince William's first born. While talking to children in Grimsby, England, the Duchess of Cambridge accepted a a teddy bear from a woman and reportedly said, "Thank you, I’ll take that for my d--"

A bystander, 67 year-old Sandra Cook, then asked the duchess, “You were going to say daughter, weren’t you?”

“No, we don’t know,” Middleton replied.

But an update in the Huffington Post quickly deflates any semblance of the rumor:

Do abandoned children have the right to know their origins?

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 16:00:00 +0000

It has become common practice in the United States, Europe, and worldwide for governments to provide baby boxes or “safe surrender” sites, usually near hospitals, where mothers or relatives of unwanted newborns may abandon them anonymously, so that they may be cared for by others and eventually adopted. Such programs are intended to prevent infanticide and deaths from infant abandonment and have succeeded in doing so around the world. Despite this success, the United Nations has called the provision of baby boxes into question.

Do such programs violate the human rights of the abandoned babies? The obvious answer is no, since the service provides desperate mothers an alternative to infanticide or unsafe abandonment. In fact, baby boxes appear to promote children’s right to life, as described in Article 6 of The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

Mall cops harass breast-feeding moms for “exposing themselves”

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:26:00 +0000

In response to a report that clothing retailer Hollister had asked a nursing mother to leave their Dallas, Texas store, three women staged a "nurse-in" at Delaware's Concord Mall in protest. Carrying posters that read, “Hey Hollister, my baby has a right to eat. It’s the law,” as well as “Normalize breastfeeding in public. Do you eat in public? Why shouldn’t our babies?”, the mothers each began breast-feeding their children inside the mall.

It wasn't long before security showed up. And they weren't exactly supportive. As reported by NBC Philadelphia:

“Two security guards walked up to us,” said Autumne Murray of Elkton, Maryland. “They started questioning us and asking us why we were exposing ourselves and saying that we needed to leave or cover up. We got in an argument with them about it for a little bit and then they left.”

When mall security returned, they brought along a Delaware State Trooper who was on routine patrol, according to state police.

“He was asking if we were exposing ourselves saying that the security guards said we were exposing ourselves and that we could be kicked out of the mall if we didn’t cover up,” said Murray.

Study: Language learning may begin in utero

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:37:00 +0000

A new study out of Pacific Lutheran University shows that fetuses can learn individual speech sounds like vowels and consonants while still in the womb. The study, set to be published in the journal Acta Paediatrica, is the first to indicate that language learning can begin prenatally.

Researchers gathered data from 40 infants in the U.S. and another 40 in Sweden, all less than 3 days old. The newborns were tested on two types of vowel sounds -- 17 from their native language sounds and 17 from a foreign language. Researchers then measured the infant's response to the sounds by how long they sucked a pacifier connected to a computer. The babies could control how many times they heard the vowels by sucking continuously on the pacifier, hearing the same vowel sound until they paused. Sucking the pacifier again produced a new sound. According to Science Daily, the pattern reveals how infants absorb new information:

Are we born with a sense of fairness?

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 16:03:00 +0000

Evolutionary biologist Gordon Orians and I are working on a project to investigate the origins and evolution of the human sense of fairness, and the role it plays in modern social, economic, and political institutions. I recently gave a talk on the subject.

To begin the talk, I asked the audience members to recollect their first encounter with the concept of fairness. I had formed a fledgling hypothesis, and wanted to put it to the test.

As people raised their hands, I called on them to share their memories. A pattern quickly emerged:

“I had to take the rap for something my sister actually did!”
“My parents gave my brother a puppy, and I’m the one who loved dogs. He didn’t even like them.”
“I came from a family with nine siblings, and we had to fight each other for food.”
“I was an only child, and I really wanted a brother – all my friends had brothers.”
“I was foreign, and different, and all the other kids singled me out to pick on.”

Is Mississippi about to execute an innocent man?

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000

We’ve had too many reminders over the years that the death penalty system is deeply flawed. Now we have one more, with the case of Jeffrey Havard, a man who is scheduled for execution in Mississippi, despite serious questions about his guilt.

Writing at theHuffington Post , Radley Balko describes how Havard was convicted in 2002 of murdering his girlfriend’s six-month-old daughter. Havard says he dropped the baby after giving her a bath – a terrible accident – but he was convicted after a private medical examiner claimed his autopsy found evidence of Shaken Baby Syndrome and sexual abuse.

But there are now questions surrounding those autopsy results. As Balko writes, “experts have begun to question the validity of the [SBS] diagnosis and how it's used in court, pointing out, for example, that a number of other factors could cause the symptoms that experts have been telling juries could be caused only by shaking.”

Drinking while pregnant can lower baby’s IQ

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:05:00 +0000

Drinking in the third trimester of pregnancy—even just a glass or two of alcohol a week—may lower a baby's IQ by a few points, according to new research. The issue has been long debated by doctors, but a new study led by Ron Gray, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, suggests that light drinking does harm a baby's brain development. Researchers tested for slow metabolizing genes in thousands of pregnant women—some who abstained from alcohol during pregnancy, and others who drank the equivalent of a half pint to three pints of beer (or three small glasses of wine) a week. Eight years later, researchers examined the IQ's of 4,167 of these women's children; they found across the board that women who drank lightly or not at all during pregnancy gave birth to children with higher IQ's. "This is good evidence to implicate moderate drinking during pregnancy having an effect on childhood IQ at age 8," says Gray. "Some women are going to be genetically more vulnerable or resilient than others to the effects of alcohol on the fetus, but we don't know who those people are."

Occubaby is born!

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 21:34:00 +0000

Salon is thrilled to share news of the birth of Occubaby. As we reported last month, a young woman who was pepper-sprayed by the NYPD during an early Occupy protest fell in love with, and became pregnant by, the street medic who tended to her stinging eyes.

According to a report from The Daily, Occubaby, real name Tegan Kathleen Grodt, was born to Robert Grodt and Kaylee Dedrick on Sept. 28. Even in its first days, the littlest Occupier can represent -- The Daily noted that a onesie bearing the letters "Occupy Wall Street" was sent to the couple by the OWS Screen Guild.

Watch the infamous pepper spraying incident below, an unexpected start to love and a new little life:

Can babies read?

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:08:00 +0000

The video clip on Larry Sanger’s website shows the cofounder of Wikipedia looking both scholarly and paternal with his owlish glasses, thinning pate, open book, and lapful of chubby-cheeked 3-year-old. Sanger’s son is gazing hard at the book pages and pronouncing words with the charming r-lessness of a toddler: “Congwess shall make no waw wespecting an establishment of wewigion or pwohibiting the fwee exewcise theweof or abwidging the fweedom of speech or of the pwess…” It’s not clear whether the boy is working toward a doctorate, like his dad's, or training to be our future pwesident. But it is stunningly obvious that the boy is sight-reading the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution at an age when most tots can’t tell an a from a b. When an influential philanthropist viewed the video, says Sanger, “he was gobsmacked.”