In the comments to another thread, “Ed” - whose views are typical of many Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), although I don’t know if Ed himself identifies as an MRA - writes:

It’s true that some women have “tricked” men into fatherhood and child support - for example, the 1997 case of State of Louisiana v. Frisard, in which a woman gave oral sex to a man wearing a condom, and then secretly used the sperm in the condom to get pregnant. (The courts decided that Mr. Frisard was liable for child support, a result I find appalling). (For more information about Frisard and some similar cases, see this article).

But even acknowledging that such cases happen, that still doesn’t support the idea that child support payments significantly motivate women to “trick” men into involuntary fatherhood. In the Frisard case, it appears the woman was motivated by a desire for motherhood, and so would probably have acted the same way even if no child support laws exist.

Do women seek pregnancy in order to get the financial benefits of child support, as David suggests?

And who has the most incentive to prevent pregnancy, women or men?

I’d say women do. Women, after all, face the risks and physical burdens of pregnancy, and (if they wind up collecting child support) face not only the financial expense but the enormous workload of raising a child - a workload that will make much more difficult, and possibly entirely derail, any other plans the woman had for her life. The workload, unlike the expense, is not split with another adult. On the other hand, for those women who want to be mothers, that could be an incentive in favor of getting pregnant.

Next to all that, the benefit of receiving child support is so minor that I wouldn’t expect it to have a significant effect on women’s incentives.

Many MRAs - and Ed, if I’ve understood him correctly - believe that child support laws give women a strong incentive to get pregnant and thus “trap” men into financially supporting them. Furthermore, many MRAs seem to believe that there is very little men can do to prevent pregnancy (hence the frequent claim made by MRAs supporting “choice for men” that all reproductive decisions are made by women).

This is a conflict, between what many MRAs believe and what many feminists believe. Is there any way we can settle this conflict empirically?

I believe there is.

Not all states have the same child support laws. In some states, the child support laws are relatively weak; noncustodial parents don’t pay much, and can relatively easily get away with defaulting on child support payments - or can depend on never being identified as the father at all. Other states have higher child support awards, laws that aggressively establish paternity, and collection techniques that make defaulting unlikely (such as garnishing child support from paychecks).

If the MRAs are correct, then states with strong child support laws will have higher rates of single motherhood, due to more women - tempted by the prospect of well-enforced child support awards - choosing to trick men into getting them pregnant.

If I’m correct, however, then states with weak child support laws will have higher rates of single motherhood, because while women’s incentives aren’t changed much by child support laws, a significant number of men are less motivated to avoid pregnancy if they think they can get off the hook.

So what do studies comparing how weak and strong child support laws effect single motherhood find? It’s men, not women, who have their incentives changed by child support laws. The stronger child support laws are, the lower the rate of single motherhood.

Robert Plotnick, of the University of Washington, published a study in 2005 which included a brief review of the literature.

Plotnick’s 2005 study (which is described, and available for download, here) replicated the earlier studies’ findings.

What does this mean?

It could mean, as I believe, that women already have such strong incentives to avoid pregnancy, that child support awards (which are, typically, not all that generous) don’t significantly alter the equation for most women.

However, it is also possible that Ed is correct, and that child support laws do strongly increase women’s incentive to get pregnant. However, this is only possible if we assume that men’s incentives to avoid pregnancy are even more strongly increased - so that even though women are trying harder to entrapt men into paying child support, men are nonetheless successful in preventing pregnancy, despite women’s increased efforts. So the MRA belief that women are motivated by child support payments into trapping men, ironically can only be rescued by giving up the MRA belief that men are not able to prevent pregnancy from happening.

The empirical evidence is clear: the net effect of child support laws isn’t that women get pregnant more often to collect on child support. Rather, the stronger child support laws are, the more men work at avoiding pregnancy.

As part of my attempt to revamp the moderation policy, there are now new rules for anti-feminist, men’s rights activist, and right-wing posters. Please check ‘em out and let me know your thoughts.

Good news - VAWA (the Violence Against Women Act) has passed reauthorization in both the Senate and the House, with a 20% increase in funding. It will not have to be reauthorized again until 2010.

VAWA, among other things, funds grants to shelters and other programs assisting victims of domestic violence. It also funds some high-quality federal research on subjects like rape, domestic violence, and stalking, which although not the most important thing VAWA does, is one reason I’m such a big fan of it.

This Mother Jones article will give interested readers a sense of the stuff VAWA funds. If you’re really interested, you can also read over the testimony given at the US Senate Committee Meeting on VAWA.

Another interesting change: Men’s Right’s Advocates succeeded in getting some new language put into VAWA:

I’m glad that provision has been added; I’m not convinced that VAWA was being generally applied in a way that excluded men (despite the unfortunate title, most of VAWA is written in scrupulously gender-neutral language), but having nondiscrimination explicitly stated in the legislation is still a good thing.

On the other hand, it worries me that some of the MRAs who are happy over this new language see it as the first step towards eliminating VAWA entirely. Here’s an exchange from a men’s rights forum:

So much for the claim that MRAs aren’t seeking to defund shelters for women. (To be fair, perhaps the MRAs quoted above - despite Dr. Evil’s statement - don’t speak for all MRAs).

UPDATE: Dr. Evil has implied that he wants to eliminate VAWA but somehow replace the funding VAWA provides to shelters. So he’s anti-VAWA, but pro-funding-shelters. My apologies to Dr. Evil for my misunderstanding.

By the way, if you have a link you’d like other “Alas” readers to see, or just something you’d like to say that isn’t on-topic in one of the other threads, please feel free to post it in these “link farm” posts.

What do people think of these big “link farm” posts? Do you like them? Would you like them better if I split each one up into a whole bunch of one-item posts instead?

Anyway, here’s some stuff I’ve read today and really liked. Note that the stuff in quote marks is written by the people I’m linking to, not by me.

Quite a while ago, regarding the “Choice for Men” debate, Cathy Young asked me:

Yes, but the comparison is misleading; it implies that the disparity is caused by hypocrisy in the feminist position, when the disparity is actually caused by differences in male and female anatomy. (No pro-choicer would deny men the right to abortion, if men were physically capable of pregnancy.)

When pro-lifers say women’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, what they really mean is, “I want to deny you one of your medically viable options.” There’s no reason, except for pro-life laws, that women can’t get an abortion after pregnancy begins.

In contrast, when I say men’s chance to decide about parenthood is before pregnancy happens, that’s a statement of biological fact. It’s not an argument in favor of denying men viable medical options; it’s an observation that men physically lack those options.

Although the statements look similar on the surface, the substantive difference between the two positions is enormous, and can’t fairly be overlooked.

Time for another link farm…

What if I called myself a conservative - but virtually all of my writings on the subject were devoted to passionately denouncing conservatives, and I didn’t actually favor any conservative policies to address any of today’s problems? What if I had virtually never published a positive word about conservativism (apart from “however…” type passages in essays denouncing conservatism?) What if my self-styled conservativism had the practical effect of giving myself a better platform from which to denounce conservatism?

My guess is that, if all that were the case, most conservatives would find my claim to conservatism suspect. Modern conservativism encompasses many different views, but it doesn’t encompass the view that modern conservatism is a terrible idea that ought be done away with.

On a feminist mailing list, I recently called Cathy Young an “anti-feminist journalist.” Cathy has taken issue with this:

Okay, let’s take this a bit at a time.

Is “Anti-Feminist” Always A Pejorative?

Do I use “anti-feminist” as a pejorative - that is, as the OED puts it, as “a word or expression which by its form or context expresses or implies contempt for the thing named”? I don’t think I do. I use it just as I use words like “libertarian” “republican” and “conservative” - terms which describe political philosophies.

It’s true that in the loose talk of a comments section that was (at that moment) pretty much all-feminist, I wrote that Cathy said “stupid anti-feminist things.” In hindsight, I should’ve put that more diplomatically (i.e, “endorses terrible anti-feminist ideas”), but I’m sure I’ve also referred casually to “stupid republican things” at some point in my life - and I bet many conservatives have done the same with words like “feminist” and “liberal,” when they’ve been talking casually among the like-minded. That doesn’t make any of these words pejoratives which can’t be used in a good-faith debate.

What Does “Feminist” Mean?

Before we can define “anti-feminist,” we have to discuss what “feminist” means. And here, we immediately run into trouble: feminism has dozens of meanings, depending on who you speak to. And, clearly, I have no authority (or desire) to define feminism for anyone apart from myself; people who want to think of themselves as “feminists” are free to do so regardless of if I agree.

So I’ll just talk about what “feminist” means to me. Here’s how I’ve put it in the past:

Cathy would presumably find that a “rigid ideological definition of what ‘feminism’ is.” One of Cathy’s anonymous readers is harsher, writing that “Anyone with whom [Ampersand] disagrees on gender issues is ‘anti-feminist’ and is therefore a complete reactionary bigot.”

I don’t think either of these claims hold up to scrutiny. Far from being “rigid,” my definition of “feminist” is a vast sprawling tent, easily encompassing countless contrary feminist opinions (radical feminist, eco-feminist, liberal feminist, socialist feminist, womanist, cultural feminist, trans feminist, third wave feminist, etc etc). And although I disagree with aspects of most of those views, I’ve never called them “anti-feminist” views - because they’re not.

What is Anti-Feminism?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines an anti-feminist as “One opposed to women or to feminism.” Cathy doesn’t oppose women, but you’d have to impossibly distort her work to argue that she doesn’t oppose feminism; virtually all her writings on feminism are attacks on feminists and feminism. The OED offers a second definition: “a person (usu. a man) who is hostile to sexual equality or to the advocacy of women’s rights.” Cathy isn’t hostile to equality (and she’s not a man!), but her writing clearly is “hostile to… the advocacy of women’s rights.” She thinks women already have virtually all the rights they need, and therefore further advocacy is unnecessary.

In the introduction to her book Ceasefire!, Cathy concedes that in one area - the family/work balance - women might still have a legitimate complaint. But virtually all other concerns that justify a “case for continued feminist activism,” she dismisses as illegitimate. There’s a big difference between criticizing some feminist views, and denying that there’s a legitimate need for a women’s movement at all. How can anyone who doesn’t see a need for a movement for women’s equality, be a feminist?

As I wrote two years ago:

Why This Matters: Does Feminism Have Any Meaning At All?

The danger I see in Cathy’s views is that, if they were generally accepted, the result would be that the word “feminist” would be drained of meaning. If Cathy is a feminist, then feminism is no longer “an organized movement for the attainment of… rights for women” (to quote the definition of “feminism” Cathy cites). Feminism no longer means fighting sexism against women. Judging by Cathy’s writings, her brand of feminism involves attacking feminism at every turn while generally supporting men’s rights activists.

In Cathy’s view, being a feminist doesn’t require endorsing any feminist policy positions, or ever taking a pro-feminist stand in public, or being part of a movement for attaining women’s equality, or thinking such a movement can do any good at all. In the end, Cathy seems to think “feminist” is a term that can reasonably be applied to anyone who doesn’t explicitly oppose equality. But nowadays, virtually everyone says they favor equality, so that means nothing.

I agree with Cathy that a “rigid ideological definition” of feminism would be a mistake. But the opposite mistake - being so all-inclusive that “feminism” ceases to mean much of anything - is just as bad.

Uppdatering: There seems to be a related discussion going on here. Unfortunately, I can’t understand a word of it Swedish. If any “Alas” readers can read that language Swedish, please let the rest of us know the gist of their discussion. :-)

Uppdatering Uppdatering: There’s a translation, by the author, posted in the comments now. Yay!

Remember, there’s just a week and a day left to write your entry to the IWF’s College Essay Contest! (Here’s my previous post about the contest).

Writing 750 words is easy, and the first prize is $5000 - and what could be more fulfilling for a young feminist than spending $5000 of anti-feminist money? So if you’re a female undergrad, give it a shot!

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Two of my favorite right-wing bloggers, Jane Galt and Cathy Young, have commented - in a rather unkind fashion - on Nicks’ recent posts about rape. Jane, responding to Nick’s fantasy of what Nick’s “ideal world” would be like, wrote:

Check out this post by the Countess (aka Trish Wilson), debunking various men’s rights claims about the supposed epidemic of false abuse accusations in divorce court. They’ve been shouting louder lately because PBS broadcast a report about abusers who receive custody of their children. From Trish’s post:

It is telling that [men’s rights activist] Glenn Sacks did post the daughter’s side of the story, but he buried her statement within his web site. It is not on the main page that gives prominence to the statements of her allegedly abusive father and those who support him.

Most tellingly, the daughter’s statement is on Sacks’s web site entitled “The Opposition’s Side Of The Story.” This teenaged girl who spoke about her own experience of being abused by her father and stepmother is considered “the opposition”. That’s one hell of a Freudian slip.

It really is. Read Trish’s whole post.

UPDATE: Glenn thinks that readers should look at this page before making up their minds. And Trish has posted a lengthy statement from the mother, here.

UPDATE 2: Trish has set up this webpage containing many relevant links.

UPDATE 3: Cathy Young attempts to sort through the claims and counter-claims.

Another interesting chart from the Bureau of Justice Statistics:

Cathy Young at The Y Files defends Alito’s argument that the government can require married women to inform their husbands before they can have an abortion:

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My desktop is getting cluttered with links that I won’t have time to blog about….

Heidi at Letters of Marque on What Women Want: “In short, what this particular woman wants is a wife. And I resent (in a vague sort of way) the fact that socially and actually, it’s harder for me to get a wife than it is for a man to do so.”

Hilzoy does a terrific job refuting claims that the Violence Against Women Act is pork spending. (Sheesh!)

And also at Obsidian Wings, Edward points out that the US - in its immigration law - does expect married couples to actually share romance and affection. This conflicts with the claims of anti-same-sex-marriage folks who, ridiculously, have claimed that there is no connection between romantic love and marriage at all.

Kieran at Crooked Timber presents some data on wives and/or mothers in the workforce

From an essay on gender and Katrina in the Chicago Tribune: “And yet there is another equally important and starkly apparent social dimension to the hurricane disaster that media coverage has put in front of our eyes but that has yet to be “noticed”: This disaster fell hard on one side of the gender line too. Most of the survivors are women. Women with children, women on their own, elderly women in wheelchairs, women everywhere–by a proportion of what looks to be again somewhere around 75 or 80 percent.” I’d like to see more on this; I’m not sure if this writer is working from solid data or subjective impressions.

Some more ignored victims of Katrina, via Professor Kim: Latino immigrants, American Indians, and prisoners.

Anti-Feminist watch: Cathy Young, in my opinion the most intelligent anti-feminist journalist out there, has a blog.

Lucinda Marshall says it wasn’t just hysteria; women probably were were raped in Katrina disaster areas. Read her article, and her interview with Judy Benitez of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault. “Some have suggested that since there are not yet official reports of rapes in the Superdome or elsewhere during the hurricane aftermath, then clearly it is just so much histrionic rumor. The idea that because something cannot be measured, it does not exist is ridiculous.”

You know, I can forgive Yahoo and Google and Microsoft cooperating with China’s censorship program - I’d rather folks in China have censored access than no access. Plus, these folks would have faced censorship regardless of what US corporations do. But now Yahoo has cooperated with China police to throw a journalist in jail for ten years. There are some compromises that no one should be willing to make for money or access; Yahoo has now made it clear that had they existed in Nazi Germany, they would have been eagerly leading the SS to hidden Jews if there was a buck for them in it. They’ve moved far beyond disgusting. Hat tip to Tennessee Guerrilla Women, who links to a WaPo editorial on the subject.

Also at Guerrilla Women, Congressman Stacey Campfield - who is white - wants to join the Black Congressional Caucus. “The East Tennessee Republican says that when he was told that he could not join the Black Caucus because he is white, he thought, ‘What? Whoa!’” There are also quotes from some of Campfield’s semi-literate emails; he sounds like a generic right-wing troll, but he’s really a GOP congressman!

And once again at Tennessee Guerrilla Women, a new British study suggests that men die sooner in more patriarchal societies than in more egalitarian societies.

Las Vegas Weekly has a story about the UFCW union hiring underpaid, no-benefit workers to picket Wal-Mart. The story writer obviously has an anti-Union bias, but unless she’s outright lying then she has a point. Unions of all people have no excuse for mistreating workers.

You know, I somehow missed linking to the genuinely ridiculous Focus on the Family “Is Your Child Becoming Homosexual?” piece last month, which many bloggers made fun of, including Balloon Juice. If you want a good laugh combined with an undercurrent of dread about how genuinely warped by hate these so-called “Christians” are, give it a look. (Focus on the Family, perhaps in response to the widespread mocking, has seemingly taken the original page down).

Bush has given the Saudis a pass on their participation in international sex slave trading. Ecuador and Kuwait were given free passes, too. As Mark Kleiman comments, what’s a little slave trading among friends?

Scott at Lawyers Guns and Money has a good post pointing out the obvious: despite their claims that they’re concerned with “activist judges” and the like, when it comes to opposing queer couple’s interests, anti-SSM folks are concerned with substance rather than process.

Ann Althouse has an excellent post defending the use of foreign court opinions by American judges.

“The incidence of teen gonorrhea in the United States is 70 times that in the Netherlands and France.” Well, thank goodness for abstinence-only education! (Via Majikthise).

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This post was removed by request of the author.

Thanks to a commenter on the thread about feminism and the murder rate, I found some interesting discussion about Latoyia Figueroa’s murder (scroll down about two-thirds of the page). Criminologist Jack Levin addresses the horrifying fact that the most common cause of death among pregnant women and new mothers is murder by speculating about the cultural pressures that might drive men to kill women who are carrying their children:

We glorify, we romanticize fatherhood but there are many men who don’t want it. They see the baby as an obstacle to their success.

Of course, there’s more to it than that: some men who don’t want to be fathers take the responsibility for avoiding fatherhood onto themselves, while others expect their girlfriends to bear all the responsibility. The ones who think murdering your pregnant girlfriend is an appropriate response to an unwanted pregnancy push the sexist, women-are-to-blame thinking to its extreme, but the difference between believing you have the right to kill her and believing you have the right to compel her to have an abortion is one of degree and not kind.

It’s true that one of the ways our culture contributes to crimes like this is by putting pressure on men that some cannot live up to. But the other side of the coin is the image of motherhood and femininity as subservient to male control that makes these men consider their partners as objects for them to control and, if necessary, destroy. Both are cultural pressures, both are factors in crimes like that, and I’d prefer to see more attention paid to the one that directly affects women than to the one that could be read as excusing men.

But at least Levin is focussing on the actions of the criminal. Criminal profiler Pat Brown picks up this social pressure and runs with it into blame-the-victim territory:

I think we also have women out there who are not picking men who want to be fathers. It’s a simple solution for the women. Don’t get pregnant by men you do not trust and absolutely think want to be in a relationship and want to move into fatherhood.

Such a simple solution. Don’t want to be murdered? Don’t marry a murderer. Don’t want to be raped? Don’t let yourself be alone with a rapist. Don’t want to be used as a sexual object and then discarded? Don’t associate with sexist jerks. Not to say that victims of murder and rape are to blame for what happens to them, of course, but we know there are predators out there and it makes sense for women to take these few simple steps to protect themselves.

It falls to Levin to point out the flaw in this plan:

Not all of these guys…in fact some of them are the last person you’d suspect and that’s part of the secret of being a sociopath and getting away with murder. So you know sure, let’s use warning signs and common sense, but it doesn’t always work.

Until men who see women as expendable objects start wearing labels to distinguish them from the rest of the male population, “don’t get involved with a jerk or a sociopath” isn’t a solution at all. There are men who appear to be wonderful, caring people as eager for parenthood as the women who fall for them, but who, at the first sign of things not conforming to their fantasies, blame the women and expect them to fall immediately into line. When the man who is genuinely trustworthy and the man who is only trustworthy as long as he gets what he wants look the same to the naked eye, what’s a girl to do?

Whatever filters women set up to screen out the jerks and the sociopaths, they lose. No filter is perfect: it will either underblock and let undesirables through or overblock and screen desirables out. If the filter underblocks, you could end up with someone who thinks murder is an acceptable form of birth control, and the likes of Pat Brown will suggest that it’s your fault for not realising who you’d tangled with. And if it overblocks, you’re an evil misandrist who thinks all men are rapists and won’t give a nice guy a chance.

But given that the stakes are so high, why do “nice guys” deserve a chance before they’ve produced solid evidence, as opposed to unreliable assertion, of why they should be trusted? Outside of feminist discussions, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the question asked. Nice guys deserve a chance because they’re nice guys, and because deep down, a woman really needs a man and won’t be happy without one. Male privilege and the myth of subservient femininity, all packed into one unexamined assumption.

“Alas” reader Maureen sent me the link to this story in the Guardian, about an election in New Zealand:

Don Brash, the aptly named leader of the centre-right National party, faced Ms Clark in a televised debate last week, and came off second best. When asked why he had done so badly, Mr Brash suggested he had deliberately gone easy on Ms Clark. “I think it’s not entirely appropriate for a man to aggressively attack a woman and I restrained myself for that reason,” Mr Brash explained. “Had the other combatant been a man, my style might have been rather different.” Ms Clark herself offered a more plausible alternative explanation: “Sounds like an excuse for losing to me.”

Unhappily for Mr Brash, opinion polls show that a majority of voters regard Ms Clark as a stronger leader than him by a margin of two to one. But if we assume Mr Brash wasn’t merely trying to distract the electorate from his poor performance with a sexist remark, losing the election will surely come as a relief to him. Imagine the embarrassing situations being prime minster would involve. How could he, for example, argue forcefully with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice? Or stare down Chinese vice-premier Wu Yi? Would he have to graciously give way to any demands made by Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s prime minister?

Luckily Mr Brash’s sense of chivalry is unlikely to endure such humiliations - his party lags Ms Clark’s by more than 9% in the latest polls.

Sweeeeet.

I’ve been reading a lot of pregnancy and parenting magazines lately. The occasional piece of advice on what I can do now to make labour easier almost makes it worth wading through the rest: relentless pressure to buy Stuff and soft-focus images of a family life I know I can never achieve. Then I turn to the advice page and find a real slap in the face.

I’m six months pregnant and my partner refuses to be at the birth. I feel so let down - will I really have to go through labour on my own?

I’m not a trained advice columnist, but I do know a bit about how it feels to be facing labour without a partner’s full support. If this woman came to me for advice, I’d reassure her that she doesn’t need to go through it completely alone, but there’s something else it’s just as important for her to hear. She’s allowed to feel let down; she’s allowed to feel that her partner has left her to face what may well look like a terrifying ordeal with no support. If she hasn’t already done so, she should talk to her partner about how she feels - women often feel pressure to keep their feelings under wraps, to deny them in the interests of “avoiding conflict” or because asking to be listened to might be seen as “selfish”.

But what’s the first thing the trained advice columnist recommends? She suggests trying to see it from the partner’s point of view, followed by a string of reasons why fathers-to-be are afraid of labour. Some are valid, like the fear he’ll let his partner down by fainting when she needs him most; others less so, like the fear that witnessing the birth will put him off sex. All of them miss the point.

It makes no difference to this woman why her partner doesn’t want to be present. She’s the one going through labour, he won’t support her, she feels let down. That’s the problem she’s asked for advice about, and the advice to see things from his point of view is suspiciously close to telling her that her feelings aren’t as valid as his.

Chances are, she’s already tried to see it from his point of view. Women are schooled fairly hard at “seeing it from his point of view” - I managed to skip most of my female-socialisation modules, but empathy was one of the ones that stuck. A tendency to look for the other fellow’s motivations stood me in good stead when it came to creating characters in my novels, but it also led me to cut manipulative partners far more slack than they deserved and to make concessions to people who had no intention of making concessions in return.

Empathy is an essential ingredient in a healthy intimate relationship, but it has to come from both sides. If her partner tried looking at it from her point of view, he might behave differently. He might recognise that whatever fears he has about labour, hers are likely to be worse because it’s her body that’s involved. He might see that after everything she’s gone through already in the course of this pregnancy, supporting her during labour is the least he can do in return. And even if he concludes that he cannot face the delivery room, he can understand how let down she feels and possibly support her in other ways so she knows he’s still there for her.

But no. All these things are beyond him because he’s just a man. Men aren’t expected to show any empathy, especially not when there are women around to show enough for two. She has to see things from his point of view in order to relieve him of the burden of seeing things from hers.

When empathy is a one-way street, it becomes all about his feelings. He doesn’t want to be there when she gives birth, and she is expected to understand and respect that. She wants his support, but he is under no obligation to understand or respect that. In fact, she shouldn’t even mention how much she wants him there: “It’s better if you don’t put him under pressure.”

Why offer such lousy advice? I understand that the advice needs to concentrate on things the woman can do, rather than things her partner ought to be doing, but there’s still plenty of advice that can be offered that doesn’t involve making her feelings subordinate to his. Being honest about her feelings means risking conflict and cutting her losses to make birth plans that don’t include him may make him feel left out, but neither of these things will cause the same long-term harm as convincing herself that her feelings don’t matter and her only option is to understand and support his.

Or are women always responsible for looking after men’s feelings? Even when they’re pregnant, and even according to other women? If I wasn’t already a feminist, that would be enough to convert me.