New mothers’ voices are lower and more monotone for about a year after the birth
The voices of new mothers temporarily drop by more than one piano note after pregnancy, scientists have claimed.
Researchers from the University of Sussex found new mothers’ voices become lower and more monotonous after they have had their first baby.
Continue reading...In Northern Ireland a rape victim seeking to end a pregnancy risks a longer sentence than her attacker. This has to change
The jubilation at the result of the referendum on abortion in Ireland quickly gave way to rage as focus turned to Northern Ireland, where women are treated as second-class citizens when it comes to their reproductive rights.
Related: Theresa May must stand up for the women of Northern Ireland – whatever the DUP says | Suzanne Moore
Related: After the abortion vote, I want to thank Britain. You were there for Irish women | Anne Enright
Continue reading...From Chanel to Victoria’s Secret, visible bumps and breastfeeding are increasingly being used to sell clothes. It says a lot about fashion’s changing relationship with women
Fashion loves to break its own rules, then unbreak them, then pretend the rules didn’t exist, then act as though everyone knew the rules all along, and since from the outside there is only one rule – be thin – this leads to some quite complex conversations. One year, you will find a plus-size model on every catwalk, and the next year they will have vanished.
Related: Look what came in the post: the rise of subscription shopping
Continue reading...Pro-choice and anti-abortion backers vote in historic referendum after tense campaign
Ruth Shaw and 20 of her family members and friends had flights lined up to a wedding in New York when the date was set for Ireland’s referendum on legalising abortion. None of them thought twice about what to do.
“We changed our flights,” said Shaw, who voted to lift a decades-old near-ban on abortion on Friday. “It’s really important, I’ve got two daughters.” At 6.55am, she was waiting with Simi, nine, outside Our Lady’s Clonskeagh Parish secondary school, second in line to cast her vote before heading to the airport.
Related: What you need to know: the Irish abortion referendum explained
Continue reading...Taoiseach Leo Varadkar – the Irish prime minister – has declared that he won’t be encouraging celebrations if, as seems inevitable, the yes side wins in the abortion referendum. We won’t then, be treated, to the same wild exuberance that met the gay marriage referendum vote, at least not officially. But he can be forgiven for a modestly congratulatory tone to his address to the Irish parliament on Wednesday, its last sitting before the referendum, in which he was joined by the leader of the opposition, Micheál Martin. They, the party leaders and ministers have won it, along with the broadcasters who followed them faithfully through the campaign.
In a vote in which it appears at least a third of the electorate will oppose repealing the eighth amendment to the constitution, those voters are unrepresented by the big political hitters – the sole party against repeal is tiny Renua which has precisely no seats in parliament. Neither does it have any heavyweights in the broadcast or print media to express their views; I can think of two regular columnists for the main papers who are against repealing the abortion ban in the constitution – that’s it.
Related: Ireland’s abortion debate has already succeeded in shifting my position | Gaby Hinsliff
Continue reading...Documentary photographer Olivia Harris, supported by the International Women’s Media Fund, examines the contentious issue of abortion in Ireland
On Friday Ireland will vote in a referendum that could in effect end the ban on abortion. Voters will be asked if they want to repeal the eighth amendment of the constitution, which recognises the equal right to life of mother and unborn child.
Every year, 3,000 Irish women travel overseas, usually to the UK, to end pregnancies, including those caused by rape or incest. Expectant mothers diagnosed with fatal foetal abnormalities – meaning the baby may die before full term or is not expected to live for long – must also travel to the UK for terminations.
My grandmother was bound to the Catholic church by guilt learned in childhood and the thrill of forgiveness
Continue reading...When I saw the obstetrician’s face, hope receded. She tried to find a heartbeat but there was no heartbeat in my body but my own
It’s late 2001 and Crown Princess Masako of Japan is having a baby. Her husband, Crown Prince Naruhito, is heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne, the world’s oldest hereditary monarchy. Sinking into its fourth recession in a decade, Japan hungers for good news and hopes Masako might have a boy. The Imperial Household Law of 1947 decreed that only men could assume the throne as emperor.
The doubleness of the term “confinement” – imprisonment and childbirth – seems especially apt for Masako. Though she lives secluded in a palace, she is such an object of scrutiny that she may as well reside in a glass cube at the centre of Shibuya crossing.
Related: The incidence of stillbirth hasn't changed in decades. We need to talk about why | Kristina Keneally
Death was in me. In shock, I could barely form thoughts. Someone handed me tissues. How could this be?
I chose the only outfit my baby would ever wear from a cupboard full of tiny baby clothes
What should have been a celebration was mourning, raw and untrammelled
Continue reading...I feel scarred by the constitutional amendment that meant I had to travel to Britain for a termination
I’ve never been involved in politics or campaigned for anything. If you’d told me 10 years ago that I would one day be stepping up and speaking in public about liberalising abortion law in Ireland, I would have called you crazy. But all that changed on a warm autumn day in 2011.
Related: Ireland’s abortion referendum is revolutionary politics, whoever wins | Lizzie O’Shea
The Irish abortion referendum
Related: Ireland’s abortion battle shows we must never let the fundamentalists win | Suzanne Moore
Continue reading...At 20 weeks pregnant, Siobhan Donohue knew her foetus wasn't going to survive, but the eighth amendment in Ireland's constitution meant getting an abortion was impossible. Before this week's historic referendum on whether to repeal the law, she describes a heartbreaking journey to UK to get a termination
Continue reading...Women’s reproductive rights have been ill-served by top-down politics. The campaign to repeal the eighth should inspire us all
No matter what happens in Ireland’s abortion referendum on Friday, the campaign should serve as an inspiration. For too long, women in Ireland and elsewhere have paid the price for the notion that abortion is electoral poison and no good will come of politicians campaigning on it.
The eighth amendment to the Irish constitution, introduced in 1983 and valuing the life of the mother and foetus equally, in effect prohibited lawmakers from regulating abortion. This law has had insidious and devastating consequences. In 1992 women were given the right to travel abroad to obtain an abortion, and about 170,000 women have, usually to England, effectively sweeping the issue under the carpet. In 2012 the case of Savita Halappanavar brought the issue back home. Seventeen weeks pregnant, she went to hospital in pain and began to miscarry. She was denied an abortion and later died of septicaemia. Partly as a result of this tragic case, the sense grew that this law had generated a crisis in women’s health, but there was little appetite to take the necessary steps to achieve reform.
The Irish abortion referendum
Related: Irish abortion referendum: voters on both sides prepare to head home
Continue reading...Soprano Julie Fuchs was asked to leave an opera cast because her pregnancy would ‘compromise its artistic integrity’. Why are companies not looking at different kind of compromises?
Four days before rehearsals were set to begin for the Hamburg State Opera’s production of The Magic Flute, soprano Julie Fuchs received surprising news from her employers: she would no longer be allowed to perform the part of Pamina because to do so would “compromise the production’s artistic integrity”. The crux of the theatre’s concern was that staging would have to be altered because Fuchs was pregnant. She was set to be four months along on opening night.
“As you can imagine, I am very disappointed as I am feeling vocally and physically in top form,” Fuchs wrote in a Facebook post last month announcing her dismissal. That post has since been seen thousands of times, setting off a media firestorm within the classical music world and prompting hundreds of comments from women who have encountered similar treatment. In the process, it’s helped spark a broader conversation about the unique challenges faced by parents and parents-to-be in the performing arts – and their acute vulnerability to workplace discrimination.
Cassie Raine took children to castings when family couldn't have them – so auditioned with a crying baby in her lap
Continue reading...Have you got a work-related problem? In this series we invite you to send in a short description of your predicament – so that other readers can offer solutions
I work in a role where I am required to travel about once a year. My partner and I are now trying for a baby and on checking I found that some of the places I visit on my work trip are listed as moderate risk for Zika virus. I obviously don’t want to take that risk, but equally I am reluctant to share with my workplace that I am trying to have babies. I know it can often take time and so don’t want to change the way they treat me as a colleague if they know this is in my plans. (My entire reporting line is male, so as much as I would like to be optimistic I know this will change the way I am thought of.) I am also reluctant to travel at all (even to the “safer” places) once I get pregnant as I am a bit nervous of being away. Am I within my rights to say I’d rather not?
• When leaving a message on this page, please be sensitive to the fact that you are responding to a real person in the grip of a real-life dilemma, who wrote to Working It Out asking for help, and may well view your comments here.
Continue reading...Six-week checkup would help the 50% of UK mothers with mental health problems
New mothers should receive a mental health checkup six weeks after giving birth to help tackle possible postnatal depression and other problems related to having a baby, ministers are being urged.
A cross-party group of 60 MPs and peers have written to Steve Brine, the minister for public health and primary care, demanding that all mothers in England start to undergo an assessment of their emotional and mental health carried out by a GP, practice nurse or health visitor.
Related: How to survive the mental pressures of being a new mother
The maternal check is often either not done at all or is done in a hurry at the end of the baby check appointment
Related: Our health system is failing new mothers | Maggie Gordon-Walker
Continue reading...It is the strange lot of young mothers to be never alone, but often lonely. You may have a baby stuck limpet-like to your breast, hip or lap, but for many women, particularly those heroic superbeings we call single mothers, loneliness stalks the days like a tiger.
Related: Our health system is failing new mothers | Maggie Gordon-Walker
Motherhood can be lonely for everyone – but for the millions on low incomes the situation is desperate
Continue reading...Test predicts likelihood of pregnant women developing the condition, which can be fatal
A world-first blood test that can help predict the potentially deadly pregnancy condition pre-eclampsia is being introduced at Melbourne’s Royal Women’s hospital.
The hospital helped develop the blood test, which predicts the likelihood of pregnant women developing the condition.
Related: Doctors attack Bupa plan to restrict gap cover to its approved hospitals
Related: Why is bearing children seen as more important than surviving pregnancy? | Jessica Valenti
Continue reading...Diablo Cody’s story of a mother and her night nanny is sharply written with some fine edge-of-the-seat moments but is let down by an exasperating ending
Much but not all of this movie’s good work is undone by its silly and unconvincing ending. A screenwriter less prestigious than the Oscar-winning Diablo Cody would probably get told to go away and come up with a third-act rewrite; as it is, the film finishes on an exasperating note, with retrospective questions about detail and plausibility. But never mind. Until then, we’d had a robustly acted, wittily written and intriguing psychological drama with edge-of-the-seat moments of dilemma in which the only challenge to disbelief suspension had been the idea that Charlize Theron doesn’t look like a film star.
Theron plays Marlo, a mother-of-two, heavily pregnant with a third baby. She is very stressed with her son who has behavioural problems. Her husband Drew (Ron Livingston in the central-casting standard-issue guy role) zones out in the evening and plays video games. When the baby comes, Marlo comes to the very brink of a breakdown through lack of sleep. She feels tired, useless, ugly. But then her annoying and rich brother Craig (Mark Duplass) offers her a present: hiring a “night nanny” for a month who will take the pressure off, deal with the baby all night, waking Marlo only when she needs feeds.
Continue reading...Health experts say it’s unclear how effective menstrual trackers are for the average UK woman
Growing numbers of women are using contraceptive apps, but experts have warned that they could lead to unwanted pregnancies.
The Swedish app Natural Cycles, the only certified app for contraception, has seen a surge in members from the UK in the past year with almost 200,000 members signed up, an increase from 5,000 in 2016.
Continue reading...