The women game designers fighting back on abortion rights

Through video games, live-action role-playing games and interactive documentaries, developers are challenging the conversation around reproductive rights

The year is 1972. You’re part of an underground network of feminists in Chicago that provide illegal (at the time) abortion services to vulnerable, pregnant people with few options. Despite the risk of imprisonment, and the ways that your personal experiences may not always perfectly align with your activism, you persist.

It’s emotionally complicated. It’s politically fraught. It’s a live-action roleplaying game by Jon Cole and Kelley Vanda called The Abortionists, which requires three players, one facilitator, six hours and a willingness to dig deep into the painful history of reproductive rights in the United States. That history has terrifying relevance in 2019, as numerous states pass laws that put their residents in a reality where abortion is functionally illegal. Based on the real-life work of a 1970s activist group called Jane, it challenges its participants to think about the “internal landscapes” of its players, and how they deal with the larger political and personal landscape of their world.

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Alabama pregnant woman shot in stomach is charged in fetus's death

Marshae Jones was charged with manslaughter, while the woman accused of shooting her walks free, report says

A pregnant woman from Alabama has been charged with manslaughter after she was shot in the stomach during an argument, killing the fetus.

Marshae Jones was reportedly five months pregnant when she was shot by another woman in December outside a shop in Pleasant Grove, near Birmingham.

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Air pollution 'may affect number of eggs ovaries can produce'

Results suggest environmental factors could play a role in female reproductive health

Air pollution has been linked to a drop in activity of a woman’s ovaries, researchers have revealed.

Experts say the findings suggest the female reproductive system is affected by environmental factors, although the study does not look specifically at the impact of air pollution on fertility.

Related: 'Artificial ovary' could help women conceive after chemotherapy

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2KDNeXE

Mari review – Georgia Parris' stirring drama about a pregnant dancer

Bobbi Jene Smith is excellent as a dancer attempting to reconcile motherhood, performance and family in this promising indie film

The latest triumph from Film London’s Microwave scheme – the BFI and BBC Film’s programme that has produced such worthwhile investments as Hong Khaou’s Lilting and Eran Creevy’s Shifty – is an engrossing close study of a thirtysomething woman caught between two worlds, and two states of being.

American choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith plays Charlotte, a principal in a contemporary dance troupe whose preparations for a major show are dealt two blows in quick succession. First comes a positive pregnancy test, and the realisation the body with which she so forcefully expresses herself will undergo radical change. Second, there’s a call from her family, gathering round the hospital bed of her dying grandmother. A rehearsal-room prologue has already established Charlotte’s remarkable physical flexibility; what follows is a test of mental and emotional adaptability.

Related: Three to tango: the pregnant dancer duetting with her husband

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2IThb2K

The Guardian view on parental rights: parliamentarians need them too | Editorial

A 21st-century parliament should not force any woman to choose between being a mother and an MP

Almost a third of parliamentarians in the House of Commons are women, an all-time high. This success is beginning to highlight the archaic working practices that prevent parliament from being representative of the nation it serves. In a brave and important article for these pages, the Labour MP Stella Creasy outlined her fight to get paid maternity cover for her work as a parliamentarian outside of the Commons. Ms Creasy has suffered repeated miscarriages. She now is pregnant again and says she can no longer keep her public and private lives separate. What she wants is maternity cover for MPs so that, in the autumn, her constituents in east London are not left without representation. This seems a reasonable request that ought not only to be granted to Ms Creasy but also afforded to all parliamentarians.

A woman should not to be forced to choose between being a mother and an MP. For too long Westminster has been run in otherworldly terms. The block to progress appears to be twofold. First, members of parliament are office-holders, not employees. Whereas many employees have line managers, MPs have 75,000 voters to answer to. MPs cannot seek recourse through employment law. They find themselves in a situation familiar to many self-employed people. However, MPs’ obligations are, unlike the self-employed, often largely out of their control. It is also the case that MPs’ hours are not normal working hours and their work is undertaken in the chamber and in their constituencies. Voters’ expectations are high: they demand well-researched replies to their emails and letters within hours, not days. They expect MPs to give up weekends and evenings to attend events and hold surgeries. A minority of MPs might fall short of these assumptions. But most do not.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2XUEdfS

Three to tango: the pregnant dancer duetting with her husband

A screen role as an expectant dancer prepared Bobbi Jene Smith for the real thing. She talks about doing the bump … with a bump

It’s a case of life imitating art. In the new film Mari, Bobbi Jene Smith plays a dancer who discovers she’s pregnant just as she is choreographing her first big show. After the shoot, Smith became pregnant herself, and now must face some of the same challenges to her character.

When I Skype the dancer in her New York apartment, she looks suitably glowing in the laptop’s wan light. “I don’t feel like I’m glowing!” she says. “I’m pretty tired. I can tell my body’s telling me: slow down.”

'I made sure not to do anything to make the audience worry for me'

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/31yEfw9

I’m off to have a baby, and I’m taking no tips from the new pregnancy influencers | Hadley Freeman

Where once just not vomiting in my hair was enough, now I’m supposed to wonder how cute my bump looks in my lingerie selfies

By the time you read this I will be days away from having a baby taken out of my body – something that, even as I stare down the barrel of child number three, will never stop seeming extremely weird to me. So this is the last you’ll hear from me for a few months. Who will I rant to every week? Will the baby want to hear my thoughts on politics? If his or her first word is “Trump”, we’ll all know whose fault that is.

I’ve been pregnant a bunch of times now: once with twins, now with one baby, plus assorted miscarriages and an abortion along the way. And what I’ve learned from what I think of as my 360-degree experience of pregnancy is that it is a lot like flying economy on a long-haul flight. It is so all-consuming, exhausting and uncomfortable that you can’t actually believe it will ever be over. But then it is; you walk away and never think about it again, because the ultimate destination is a lot more interesting than the journey.

Related: Breast v bottle? Motherhood is messy enough without picking sides | Hadley Freeman

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2wWHwr8

As a new parent, I felt afraid and alone. The UK needs family-friendly policies now | Nell Frizzell

Struggling to care for a baby is all too common. A new report shows the UK ranks shamefully low on support for parents

The first day my partner went back to work after we’d had a baby, I had to shower, eat breakfast and make my lunch at 4.30am. In the dark. Without waking the neighbours. I had no other choice. My partner’s 90-minute commute and his 7.30am start time meant he had to leave the flat at 6am and wouldn’t be home again until 7pm. Thirteen straight hours of keeping an utterly helpless infant alive, on my own, having never done it before. If I wanted to eat, wash the night’s sweat, breastmilk and mustard baby shit off my body and have something for lunch, then I had to get it all sorted while there was someone else on hand to hold, rock, soothe, bounce or wind our baby.

Related: UK among least family-friendly countries in OECD, survey finds

The support for mothers who struggle to breastfeed is being snatched away from us by government underfunding

Related: You can smell a new mother’s loneliness. Unless you’re the state | Nell Frizzell

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2WAbY4R

Joanne Ramos: 'Motherhood is not even seen until it's outsourced'

The author explains how The Farm, her novel about an upmarket surrogacy service, shows ‘where we are today, pushed forward a few inches’

After being sure that Donald Trump would never be president, then that his travel ban couldn’t last, or that Brett Kavanaugh would never be appointed to the supreme court, Joanne Ramos no longer trusts her own judgment. “In my heart I’m like, ‘There’s no fucking way this is going to happen,’ but it very well could,” she says. Alabama’s near-total ban on abortion has left her fearing the worst: “I still can’t fully believe it, to tell you the truth. The extremity of it is shocking. It’s everything – it’s rape or incest. I can’t believe that we’re here again.”

When the impossible keeps happening, it can feel disorienting and overwhelming: “It’s like, what is up and what is down? … It’s like you’re living in a world that’s been turned.”

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2XgzUPa

UK among least family-friendly countries in OECD, survey finds

League table compiled based on parental leave and childcare levels puts UK in bottom third

The UK is among the least family-friendly of the world’s richest countries, according to a Unicef assessment of policies on child care and parental leave.

While Estonia offers women 85 weeks’ maternity leave at full pay after having a baby, the UK comes out as one of the meanest of the 41 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD), placing 31st with an offer of six weeks at 90% of pay and 33 weeks at a lower rate – equivalent to 12 weeks of full pay, according to the data.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Rc63BQ

Beware the fertility app that wants to share your data with anti-abortion campaigners

Most of us happily upload the most personal information on to the apps we use everyday. But do we really want to share our data with organisations funded by anti-abortion campaigners?

Updating a mental list of what our phones have become today includes, but is not limited to, high street, museum, magazine, therapist, nightclub, funhouse mirror, personal trainer and abusive partner. A chilling recent addition is “crisis pregnancy centre”.

Five years ago the scandalous practices of Britain’s unregulated crisis pregnancy centres were revealed, offices where women who believed they were receiving unbiased advice and referrals for abortion were instead met by anti-choice campaigners who lied to them over tea. They said women who’d had abortions were more likely to suffer psychological damage, more likely to get breast cancer, more likely to miscarry in the future, 70% more likely to split up with their partner, and more likely to abuse their children. “There is a statistical increase,” one counsellor told an undercover Telegraph reporter. “I mean, I’m not saying it’s many people, obviously it’s still a very low percentage, but it just seems like there’s a correlation between the two.” Mmm.

Anti-choice campaigners continue to insert themselves into women’s lives uninvited, like wasps at a picnic

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2K2D2bb

Who better than men to rule on the delicate subject of surrogacy? | Catherine Bennett

The rights and welfare of surrogate mothers are being ignored by the Law Commission

Later in her career, Baroness Warnock, architect of the UK’s fertility legislation, apologised for having “got surrogacy wrong all those years ago”. The 1984 Warnock report should not, she said, have condemned the practice. Her views had been coloured by her experience: as a mother, she would have found it impossible to hand over a baby she had carried.

Maybe it’s a good thing, then, that none of the UK law commissioners who have just set out proposals to make surrogacy easier, is capable of succumbing, as she did, to sentimental prejudice. By great good luck – for the occasional woman has, in the past, talked her way in – the six-strong Law Commission of England and Wales, tasked with modernising the law, is all male. The public can be confident that there was never a chance these reformers could allow an understanding of how it feels to carry a child, to undergo this all-consuming physical upheaval, to give birth, and then to live with the irreversible physical aftermath, to compromise their assessment of whether surrogacy is a gendered industry that this country can, ethically, encourage.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2EZJY4m

Pregnant and Platonic review – what's it like to have a baby with a stranger?

There’s warmth and emotion – if also some awkwardness – in this gentle documentary about a matchmaking service for wannabe co-parents

“It’s like being on Tinder but 100 times more awkward,” explains Saschan, a single 26-year-old who is attempting to find someone to have and raise a child with her. This is an understatement. Pregnant and Platonic meets a handful of people who are, for a multitude of reasons, looking to explore “co-parenting” – that is, an agreement between two parties, romantically unconnected, who want to have a baby. There are 40,000 people currently signed up to co-parenting sites in the UK, which act as a sort of matchmaking service for wannabe parents.

Related: 'Having a child doesn’t fit into these women's schedule': is this the future of surrogacy?

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2WvZXCm

Pregnancy is the ultimate endurance test. If a man says it, it must be true | Suzanne Moore

You can keep your Tour de France or your Arctic treks, growing and pushing out a human is the hardest work a person can do

When Harry spoke to the press in his dazed and delighted way after Meghan had given birth, he said: “How any woman does what they do is beyond comprehension.” I guess he meant labour, childbirth, that everyday agony and ecstasy that is part of women’s lives. How do we do that? After months of feeling not too grand while exposed to every myth going and being told what to eat, wear and how to behave, we have to get the baby out somehow. It’s what we do.

Related: I feel grief and relief that I’ve never had children. Other women must share this | Katherine Baldwin

Related: The ‘breast is best’ lobby has left women feeling judged and unworthy | Zoe Williams

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/31h4wPA

Childfree by choice: Stop telling me I'll change my mind later

Saying a woman will regret it returns to the idea of motherhood as the natural position and anything else as deviant

At work a while back, I was complaining that the air con – usually set to sub zero – was turned up to practically balmy. No one else agreed; my mate reached for the emergency nanna rug we keep in the office.

“Huh,” I said. “Must be the menopause.”

Related: ‘Pregnancy is a time bomb’ – what I learned about motherhood working in a women’s prison

Related: Women without children: ‘I don’t want to be pitied – I’m really happy'

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2WC7wqe