The boyfriend wasn’t there, and has not been charged, but Anvarinia was brought up on felony child-neglect charges, after she breast-fed her 6-week-old in front of the officers. While the cops insist that she was intoxicated, they did not do a blood alcohol test on her, much less the baby. But child neglect in North Dakota charges do not require such a test.

The cops say that they know three sheets to the wind when they see it. “The majority of our problems are caused by alcohol,” Grand Forks Police Capt. Kerwin Kjelstrom told the AP. “Our officers handle it so much that it is pretty much a general knowledge thing to know when someone is intoxicated. It’s pretty obvious.”

Dr. Amy Tuteur, who writes the Skeptical OB blog, argues that BWI shouldn’t be considered a crime: “Since when is breastfeeding while drunk a crime? Is it even a danger to the baby’s health? There is certainly a theoretical risk that a baby can be harmed by breastfeeding from a chronically intoxicated mother. Ethanol (alcohol) passes from the mother’s blood stream into her breast milk. However, it is diluted, and the baby receives only a tiny fraction of what the mother consumed. There is no scientific evidence that breastfeeding during a single episode of intoxication is harmful to the baby in any way.”

The cops insist that they didn’t charge Anvarinia just because she was nursing but because of the whole chaotic situation. Yet, even while issuing such assurances, one cop expressed surprise at the mom’s behavior. “This case is more than just the breastfeeding. It was the totality of the circumstances,” Grand Forks Police Lt. Rahn Farder told the AP. “It is quite unusual for a mother to be breastfeeding her child as we are conducting an investigation, whether she was intoxicated or not.”

Dr. Tuteur thinks that it was nursing that unleashed the hand of the law on Anvarinia: “Let’s be clear. They didn’t charge Ms. Anvarinia because she was drunk in her own home. They didn’t charge her because they thought that she was too drunk to care for her infant. They charged her because she was breastfeeding. Had she been bottlefeeding the baby, they would have ignored her drunkenness, though arguably the baby faced health risks from a drunken mother mixing formula. Mixing formula powder with water in the wrong proportions can be harmful to a baby.”

There isn’t a lot of good data on the impacts of alcohol passed through mother’s milk to infants, because scientists can’t ethically conduct experiments where they encourage nursing mothers to hit the bottle, and then give their babies the boob. So, data about the effects of nursing while intoxicated is anecdotal at best.

Nevertheless, the American Academy of Pediatrics says excessive alcohol consumption by a breast-feeding mother can lead to drowsiness, deep sleep, weakness and abnormal weight gain in an infant. Dr. Lori Feldman-Winter, who helps oversee breast-feeding policy for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the AP: “A mother who becomes intoxicated should not breastfeed. After drinking one glass of wine, a woman should abstain from breast-feeding for two to three hours.”

Folk wisdom holds that cracking a cold one can help with milk production and letdown, although at least one recent study has debunked that conventional wisdom. Some nursing moms “pump-and-dump” after drinking alcohol to get milk tainted with alcohol out of their systems.

Anvarinia has pleaded guilty but has not yet been sentenced. Authorities have not revealed who now has custody of the baby.

Some nursing moms expressed sympathy for Anvarinia and her infant. Sarah Jio writes on Yahoo’s Shine: “Do I think that breastfeeding while drunk is a bad idea? Yes — 100 percent. But do I think that a woman should be taken away from her infant and locked up for five years because of it? I’m sorry, but I just don’t think so. Here’s a better idea: Put the woman on probation. Make her take a year of parenting classes (which she clearly needs). Assign a CPS worker to make visits. Test her blood-alcohol level ever Friday night — whatever needs to be done. But, it breaks my heart to see a mother separated from her infant in these circumstances.”

What do Broadsheet readers think?

It’s well documented that many of the world’s major fisheries are in shocking decline. Some 90 percent of the world’s big fish, such as bluefin tuna, blue marlin and Antarctic cod, have almost disappeared from the oceans since the advent of industrial fishing in the 1950s, according to a groundbreaking paper published in Nature in 2003 by Myers and Worm. And by 2048 the world’s supply of seafood will likely simply run out, Worm and other marine biologists warned in the pages of Science in 2006. As of 2008, 80 percent of the world’s fish stocks were considered either vulnerable to collapse or already collapsed.

This sorry state of affairs has inspired numerous international efforts, such as the United Nations Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries and the Convention on Biological Diversity, in hopes of making more of the world’s fisheries sustainable. These initiatives have gained broad acceptance on the world stage, with many countries pledging to adhere to their principles. But where the trawler meets the sea, it’s a different story. “Unfortunately, our study shows that there is a marked difference between the endorsement of such initiatives and the actual implementation of corrective measures,” observe the authors of the report “Management Effectiveness of the World’s Marine Fisheries.”

Researchers spent a year approaching almost 14,000 fishery experts, including marine biologists, fishery managers and university professors around the globe, asking them to take an online survey in either English, French, Spanish, German or Portuguese about local fishing practices and policies. Almost 1,200 completed the survey from 243 countries and territories, including representatives from every country that borders the ocean. The survey asked the experts about their respective nations’ scientific data about fish populations and ecosystems, and how they translated those scientific findings into regulations and enforcement.

The dismal results: Only 7 percent of coastal states did rigorous scientific assessments to generate fishing policies; a pitiful 1.4 percent have a participatory and transparent process for turning that science into policy; and fewer than 1 percent had strong mechanisms to insure enforcement with fishing policies.

“Perhaps the most striking result of our survey was that not a single country in the world was consistently good with respect to all these management attributes,” says Camilo Mora, 34, a research biologist at Dalhousie University, who was one of the coauthors of the study. “So which countries are doing well, and which are not, is a question whose answer depends on the specific attribute you are looking at.”

Not surprisingly, rich countries had the best scientific assessment of how fish in their waters were doing, and poor countries had the weakest. But both wealthy and developing countries performed badly when it came to converting that science into policies to limit fishing, if for different reasons. “In poor countries, there was a lot of corruption going on,” explains Mora. “In rich countries, there were more political and economic pressures on the policymaking. The end result of that is that in both cases, science is not converted into proper regulation.” Rich countries did a better job than poor countries enforcing those regulations; in some poor countries, there was no enforcement at all.

But there’s a catch. While rich countries may do a better job policing fishing in their own coastal waters, they are globalizing overfishing by sending their industrial fishing fleets to hoover up the catch near poor countries. Thirty-three percent of the poorest countries in the world sell the right to fish in their waters to some of the richest countries in the world, including those in the European Union, the United States, Taiwan, China, Japan and South Korea.

Seafood makes up at least 15 percent of all animal protein consumed by humans, either directly, or indirectly as feed for the aquaculture and livestock industries. Demand for it is expected to rise as the human population increases. Fisheries employ 200 million people around the world, generating $85 billion annually. But overfishing won’t just change what’s on the end of homo sapiens’ forks, and who makes money to put it there.

“The consequences of overexploiting the world’s fisheries are a concern not only for food security and socioeconomic development but for ocean ecosystems,” says Worm, who was one of the coauthors of the paper, in a statement. “We now recognize that overfishing can also lead to the erosion of biodiversity and ecosystem productivity.”

While Mora calls on governments to become more transparent about how fishing regulations are created to help prevent outside pressures from influencing those regulations, he also says that there’s a lot that individuals can do. “The general public needs to become more aware of the consequences of the things that we consume,” he says. “I can’t see any excuse for a person to eat a bluefin tuna or a shark. These species are going extinct, and the reason for that is because of the demand for them.”

Pop’s wardrobe includes both pants and dresses, and the child usually gets to decide what to wear. “Although Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl, Pop’s parents never use personal pronouns when referring to the child — they just say Pop,” according to the English-language Swedish site the Local.

Not surprisingly, the pundits are split on the effect this flouting of convention will have on Pop. “Child-rearing should not be about providing an opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child’s needs as an individual,” Susan Pinker, a psychologist who is the author of a book about sex differences in the workplace, told the Local. “I don’t think that trying to keep a child’s sex a secret will fool anyone, nor do I think it’s wise or ethical. As with any family secret, when we try to keep an elemental truth from children, it usually blows up in the parents’ face, via psychosomatic illness or rebellious behavior.”

Yet, Kristina Henkel, Swedish gender equality consultant, says Pop’s parents’ experiment could help the child develop as an individual without being boxed in by gender-role stereotyping from birth. “If the child is dressed up as a girl or boy, it affects them because people see and treat them in a more gender-typical way,” Henkel explains. “Girls are told they are cute in their dresses, and boys are told they are cool with their car toys. But if you give them no gender they will be seen more as a human or not a stereotype as a boy or girl.”

Pop’s parents say that they will reveal the child’s gender when Pop thinks it is time to do so. In any case, he or she will soon have more company. The family is expecting another child, and with the next bundle of joy, the parents plan to continue playing the “what’s it to you?” gender card.

Redding was ordered to move her bra to the side, and stretch out her underwear waistband, exposing her breasts and pelvis. The search revealed no pills.

Writing in the majority opinion, Justice David Souter observed that the search did not take into account the relatively mild nature of the contraband at stake: “In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear,” he wrote. “We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.”

The Court did find that the school officials would have been justified if they had limited their search to the Redding’s backpack and her outer clothing, according to the New York Times. But in searching her bra and panties, the school officials violated her Fourth Amendment rights.

The Court also ruled 7-to-2 that individual school officials should not be held liable for their role in the search. The Court sent the case back to a lower court to determine what, if any, damages the school district should pay Redding.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of two justices who thought that school officials should be held individually liable. She noted that the assistant principal made Redding sit on a chair outside his office for two hours: “At no point did he attempt to call her parent,” Ginsburg wrote. “Abuse of authority of that order should not be shielded by official immunity.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are just 159,000 stay-at-home dads in the country, but Smith suggests that those numbers undercount many fathers, including him, who have served as their children’s primary caregivers by day and continued working part-time at night or in the early morning.

In his book, Smith profiles a number of “reverse-traditional families,” in which mom’s at the office while dad’s on diaper and playground duty. Yet, Smith argues that stay-at-home dads are just the most extreme form of a broader trend in which fathers, even those with full-time, BlackBerry-tethered jobs, are getting much more involved in their kids’ lives.

Recently, Smith was laid off from his job as an editor at Greater Good magazine and will now be spending more time with Liko while continuing to freelance for the magazine and look for work. I spoke with him in Salon’s San Francisco office about how fatherhood isn’t what it used to be, and why that’s a good thing.

What surprised you the most about staying home with your then-1-year-old son?

Something that millions of mothers already know, which is that taking care of a child every day is overwhelming. The classic question that the stay-at-home parent gets is: “What do you do all day?” And the answer to that is you’re paying attention, you’re improvising and keeping your child occupied. That can be really tiring. It surprised me how physically and emotionally exhausting it could be.

I think the first year of my son’s life, like a lot of fathers — like most fathers — I was really a bystander. It was my wife who gave birth, who dealt with breast-feeding, who was really his primary caregiver. And it was a shock to realize, when I became his primary caregiver, how much responsibility that was.

Did you get flak from friends or relatives about staying home?

From our friends, not at all. Nobody thought it was odd that I had become his primary caregiver. Nobody pinned a medal on my chest either.

Among our relatives, people of the older generation were very ambivalent. A female relative sent an e-mail to me and to my parents and to my wife’s parents telling me how irresponsible it was that I wasn’t working every day to support my wife so that she could stay at home with our son.

How have you seen the definition of what it means to be a good father change through the generations in your family?

My grandfather’s attitude was very much that a good father is a breadwinner. I asked him: “What challenges did you face as a father?” And he told me, “None. Your grandmother handled that. I used to go to work every day and make money so that she would have enough. And I always used to tell her: ‘You work for me.’” By the standards of his time and his social class — he was very working-class, worked in a quarry for 40 years — he was an excellent father and none of his children thought otherwise.

My father had a very different attitude. He didn’t want to be as remote and absent as his father had been. If he wasn’t at work, he was around the house and he made all my soccer practices and all my flute recitals and all of that stuff. He wanted to be an involved parent. But my parents never questioned for a moment that he would be the breadwinner and my mother would be the primary caregiver. That was always assumed.

When my wife and I became parents, we saw our roles as something to be negotiated. We never assumed that I was the natural breadwinner, and she was the natural caregiver. It was always assumed that we would both have roles in making money and in taking care of our son.

But it’s not as if the older archetypes of what it means to be a good mother or a good father have just disappeared. 

The ghost of the traditional family persists even in the most non-traditional family structures. I even see it in gay and lesbian families.

It’s still the case that while motherhood has changed to include careers, it’s still heavily weighted toward caregiving. And while fatherhood has changed to included caregiving, it’s still the case that it’s weighted toward breadwinning. And how heavy that weight is depends a lot on where you are in the country, what your economic circumstances are, what’s your cultural background. There’s no consensus about what a good father does.

If you ask men to be judged by their caregiving as well as their breadwinning behavior, that’s going to create stress for those men as they try to balance those two, just as it’s always created for mothers. What we’re doing is spreading the stress around a little more equitably.

What are some of the factors that have caused more fathers to take on more childcare?

The biggest one is that women went to work. In the families that I interviewed, the mom made more money than the husband, as do one-third of wives in America today.

It’s that combined with rising instability in the job market. There’s no such thing as lifetime male employment. That’s gone. In that kind of situation, it becomes very difficult for couples to specialize.

You can’t really afford a domestic specialist and a specialist who does paid work. Both partners have to be capable of doing one or the other at a moment’s notice. Reverse-traditional families are an evolutionary adaptation. They’re a way of surviving in a very unstable 21st century.

What effect do you think the current recession — which by all accounts is disproportionately pushing men out of work — is going to have on this trend?

Yes, 80 percent of the layoffs have been male, and traditionally male industries are getting hit hard. That means that a lot of fathers are getting thrown into roles at home.

This happened during the Great Depression. Female employment rose during the Great Depression, a lot of mothers went to work. Then World War II happened and then men went off to war and Rosie the Riveter went to work. Then the men came home and many of those women were asked to leave their jobs, which lit a fuse of resentment, which burned right through the Eisenhower years and exploded with the second-wave feminist movement.

We’ve seen these trends building for decades: rising rates of female employment, rising female incomes, rising rates of male caregiving, rising rates of men doing housework, slowly but steadily rising. We’re going into this recession with a very different set of gender relationships than existed in, say, the 1930s when my grandfather was a teenager.

I interviewed several families for my book where the father had been laid off and the mother had become the primary breadwinner, and there had been a lot of conflict in the family about that. But as time went on, he was happy being a stay-at-home dad, and she was happy with what she’d accomplished on her job.

But initially, it’s hard on families when they’re thrown into different roles?

Even when couples voluntarily take this on, the wives often experience more ambivalence than they expected. And the fathers experience a lot more stress than they expected. So if it’s involuntary, you can just turn that up to 11.

Why do you think the number of families with fathers as primary caregivers are actually undercounted?

In my neighborhood in San Francisco, at first I saw only moms on the playground. But over time I realized there were lots of dads, everywhere in my neighborhood, and we all worked.

The Census Bureau would not have classified any of us as stay-at-home dads. We all did a little bit — I freelanced as a writer, one guy was a contract archaeologist, one guy was a private chef who worked a couple of nights a week, cooking for K.D. Lang’s entourage when she came into town.

There was some degree of paid work, but we were the primary caregivers of our children. We were the ones who were in the neighborhood every single day, taking our kids to classes, going to the playground and just taking care of them.

And our wives had regular 9-to-5 jobs. So for that reason, the Census pretty dramatically undercounts the number of stay-at-home dads. Also, a third of working-class couples actually split shifts. They can’t afford childcare, so they’ll just work complementary shifts.

Do you think that the traditional breadwinning image of a dad makes caregiving fathers invisible? Is it hard for us to recognize what they’re doing as caregiving?

Exactly. I talked to an African-American pediatrician in Bayview, which, for those who don’t live in San Francisco, is a predominantly African-American neighborhood, because I was looking for stay-at-home dads to interview.

And she said, “You know, I don’t have any stay-at-home dads in my office. All I see are good old-fashioned unemployed dads.” After we had talked about it for a while, she realized what a jerk she had been when she said that, because she couldn’t see these fathers taking their children to the doctor as evidence of caring fatherhood. She could only see that as evidence of their failure as providers.

When you hear about groups that are pushing for social policies related to families, they’re things like Moms Rising, which is mother-focused.

That’s exactly true, and that creates a feedback loop. A lot of dads look at that, and they feel like they can’t relate. They’re not going to join.

I would like to say that there’s this revolutionary movement of fathers who are going to take back fatherhood and change the face of public policy. But social change happens in stages, and I think where we’re at is in the consciousness-raising stage.

To the extent there is a movement, it’s more like a literary movement than it is a social movement. You see fathers starting their own blogs, you see fathers writing books, you see fathers talking about the first times that they held their children, or fed their children, or about their struggles as caregivers.

The logical way to close off this stage is to begin asking ourselves: How can we get public policies that will support our role as caregivers? How can we get paternity leave, which only one in 10 men have access to? How can we get flextime?

But today becoming a parent is seen as a choice. Do you think that fact will work against policies that specifically support parents? Every time we write about maternity or paternity leave at Salon, we hear from people who say: “I’m childless by choice. Why should parents get any special treatment? They’ve chosen to do this.” How do you respond to that?

And that’s on a liberal Web site.

I think the root of the problem here is not parenthood. The root of the problem here is that we as a society do not recognize caregiving as a legitimate stage in every human life, not just for children, but also for elders, or sick or disabled spouses.

I believe that we as a society, in our workplaces, government and public policies, need to acknowledge that people are not robots, and that taking care of each other is critical for the sake of our humanity. But it’s also critical economically. The “invisible heart,” as the economist Nancy Folbre calls the caregiving sector, has a huge economic impact. And we need to recognize its importance.

You touched on the phenomenon of daddy bloggers, of which you are one, and I noticed that on Slate’s women’s site, Double X, Hannah Rosin complained that when dads find their voices online they “sound just like moms.” What was your reaction to that?

First of all, I don’t think that’s actually true. I think that if you look at a blog like Mike Adamick’s Cry It Out or Brian Reed’s Rebel Dad or Rice Daddies or MetroDad, they do not sound like mothers.

Stay-at-home fathers have many of the same preoccupations as mothers. They’re trying to get through their day, and juggle a hundred different things, and still have time for themselves and somehow keep their sanity. But there’s a different voice. For one thing, I think dads are a lot more likely to joke about it, sometimes ferociously.

Do you think that underlying the idea that you guys sound just like moms is a sentiment that taking care of kids instead of working outside the home is emasculating?

Hannah Rosin’s full blog entry says that taking care of kids makes men more effeminate and less sexy to her. All I can say is: A lot of parents don’t feel that way. That, to me, reveals a lot more about her hang-ups than it does about actual reverse-traditional families.

What policies do you think would do the most to support fathers as they assume more childcare responsibilities?

The No. 1 policy for fathers has got to be paid parental leave. Every country in the industrialized world has paid parental leave — in many cases, for up to a year — and it’s often gender-neutral. It is just absolutely critical that we get something like that here in the United States.

And we need better childcare policies. Right now the cap for a deduction for childcare expenses is miserably low. That’s got to be raised.

In countries where men do broadly have access to parental leave, do they take it?

Yeah, they take it, but even Sweden, which has the highest rates of male caregiving in the world, and what I’d consider to be the best family policies, is still not an egalitarian utopia. Women are still more likely to take advantage of leave policies than men. But the important thing is that way more men in Sweden are taking advantage of those policies than did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. When you’re talking about gender and families, the changes are not going to happen overnight.

What kind of research is there about children who have fathers who are very involved in bringing them up?

There’s not very much because stay-at-home fatherhood is still pretty new. Researchers have not been able to design longitudinal studies to really follow their development over a long term.

But there’s been some research. The Yale psychiatrist Kyle Pruett took a look at children who have been raised by stay-at-home dads when they were about 11 or 12 years old. He discovered that developmentally — big surprise! — they were the same as everybody else’s children.

He noticed one difference. As they were approaching adolescence the girls were not very hung up on acting like girls, and the boys, comparatively speaking, were not very hung up on acting like boys. They were just much more comfortable with more flexible gender roles.

There’s also a very interesting study by a psychologist named Robert Frank, where he compared traditional to reverse-traditional families. What he discovered was that in the traditional families, there was a high level of mother involvement and a relatively low level of father involvement. But in the reverse-traditional families there was a high level of father involvement and a high level of mother involvement from the breadwinning moms.

What evidence is there that fathers in general are doing more childcare, even when they are the breadwinner?

Studies pretty consistently show that male caregiving and male housework has been increasing steadily over the years. These are all time-use studies where psychologists or sociologists gave them forms to fill out hour-by-hour about what they’re doing right now. The trend overwhelmingly has been for fathers to do more housework and childcare. That’s true across a dozen studies that I know of off the top of my head.

What do you think are the biggest myths about stay-at-home fathers?

That reverse-traditional families are all cut from the same cloth, and that in every case, they’re white, middle-class. He has a ponytail and wears Birkenstocks and she’s this high-powered Hillary Clinton-like wife. Alternatively, that stay-at-home dads are all a bunch of moochers who can’t hold down a job. Initially, I thought that stay-at-home dads were a luxury of the affluent, and I was dead wrong, as I explored the research.

You can find reverse-traditional families in every income group. They’re actually disproportionately concentrated closer to the bottom. You find them in every racial group, you find them all over the country, and you even find them in every religious community.

A lot of people assume that Latino dads and black dads are too macho to keep the house clean and to take care of the kids. Again, empirically, the research tells us that is dead wrong. In fact, black and Latino husbands tend to do a lot more childcare and housework than their white counterparts, and oftentimes that’s in the context of splitting shifts.

Do you think that as fathers do more childcare it will help moms who do the same get more respect?

Yeah. I absolutely believe that. There’s a certain kind of feminist out there in the world — and I’m thinking especially of you, Linda Hirshman — who really denigrates caregiving. They really denigrate taking care of children, elders or of anybody. Any sort of altruistic caregiving is not worthy of an ambitious, intelligent, educated person. And I just do not believe that.

Taking care of my son broadened my life. It strengthened me, and it’s something I’ll never forget. For me it wasn’t a career, and for most people it’s not a career. Eighty percent of mothers work. But it gave me something that I’m going to take with me for the rest of my life.