Friday, July 4, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Dehumidifier (June 30) From xkcd.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral overnight after Bondi criticism (July 1, via) "With ICEBlock, users can lawfully share information about where they have seen ICE within a 5-mile radius of their location."

2. RFK is Going to Murder a Million Babies (July 1) "As Edward Nirenberg commented on BlueSky, 'if I were HHS Secretary and my goal were to kill as many children as possible, it would be difficult to distinguish the actions I would take from those that Kennedy has taken.'"

I don't *get* this. It seems to be a common thing that when you try to pin anti-vaxxers down, they say they're not anti-vax, they just want to be more careful and informed about things. (This is what RFK was saying in his confirmation hearings.) But then the actions they take are like... like they don't believe these vaccine-preventable diseases are real and deadly. 

3. New insight into Texas family detention reveals adults fighting kids for clean water (June 22) "One family with a young boy with cancer said he missed his doctor’s appointment after the family was arrested following their attendance to an immigration court hearing. He is now experiencing relapse symptoms, according to the motion. Another family said their 9-month old lost over 8 pounds (3.6 kilograms) while in detention for a month."

4. Federal judge strikes down Trump's order suspending asylum access at the southern border (July 2) "Asylum has been part of U.S. law since 1980, allowing those who fear for their safety to seek refuge in the U.S. as long as they can show a credible fear of persecution in their home country."

5. CBS is the latest news giant to bend to Trump's power (July 2) "Last year, as he campaigned for the White House, Trump promised to protect free speech and end censorship." He was lying.

6. Trump Admin Begins Processing Some Trans Passport Updates, Though It Will Maintain Data On Requests (July 2) "As of Wednesday morning, multiple transgender individuals have reported successfully obtaining updated passports at in-person passport offices."

Thursday, July 3, 2025

"The Case for Open Borders": Get in line

Clipart of people waiting in line. Image source.

Here's another quote from the book "The Case for Open Borders". From pages 153-154:

Another easy step is to keep unauthorized-entry statutes in place, but to allow all immigration through ports of entry. This might be the most broadly palatable of open-border visions, as migrants would still have to present at official ports of entry, submit documentation, and register before they were granted entry-- but all would be granted entry. People who tried to gain access between ports of entry could be turned around or sent back to come through an official port of entry. Once they arrive, a nonenforcement agency, such as USCIS, would be charged with getting their paperwork in order, but nobody would be forced to live off the books or under the threat of banishment. With such a system, the anti-immigrant quip to "get in line" would actually make sense. (Currently, for most people, except the well heeled and well connected, there is no line.) This approach would target the manner in which people come, not the people themselves.




Wednesday, July 2, 2025

"Give Birth Like a Feminist" (book review)

Book cover for "Give Birth Like a Feminist"

I recently read the book Give Birth Like a Feminist by Milli Hill. It's about the rights of pregnant people to make choices during the process of laboring and giving birth to their babies, rather than just being pushed along by doctors telling them what's going to happen. You may recall I've written before about how I'm interested in what consent should look like in a medical context- so obviously I'm interested in this book. Also I've given birth twice so yes I have some opinions on that.

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People say "A healthy baby is all that matters"

This is something I've heard many times- when a woman tells the story of how she gave birth, and there are always some things that went wrong or didn't go the way she would have preferred, and then someone says it's okay, all that matters is that the mom and baby are alive and healthy.

I don't like when people say that. Very much disagree. The writer of this book, Milli Hill, also very much disagrees.

I guess when people say all that matters is that the baby's healthy, there are 2 different ways you could understand that:

  1. Some things didn't go the way the pregnant person expected/wanted- for example, medical issues meant that the baby had to be born early, so you're rushing around in a panic, texting your manager on the way to the hospital to tell them you have to start maternity leave right now, you didn't even have time to buy things for the baby yet, all you have is a bunch of newborn clothes somebody gave you, and you thought they looked kinda old and ugly and didn't want to use them, but now that's all you have for your baby to wear. And whenever you look at your kid's newborn photos, the kid is wearing those ugly clothes. 
    The sorts of things that are like, at the time, they're really stressful, but later you look back on them and you can kinda laugh because they're not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and everything turned out fine.
  2. You feel you were pressured or coerced into doing things that you didn't want. (For example, getting an epidural or not getting an epidural, getting induced, C-section, not having skin-to-skin time right after the baby is born, etc.) You wanted your birth experience to go a certain way, but other people disregarded what you wanted and pushed you into things that you didn't want- and you were vulnerable and in pain and weren't able to stand up for yourself. You feel violated. You have trauma from that. The birth of your child is a very important moment in your life, and it could have gone so much better, but that was taken from you.
    And then you hear people say "all that matters is that the baby is healthy" like they think you should just ignore your trauma and pretend it doesn't exist.

And maybe in between these 2 things, there's a whole range of experiences that a pregnant person may have had, where they didn't get the kind of birth experience they wanted, and for some cases it's best to just conclude that it's not a big deal and move on, and for some cases, there is real trauma there, and it can only heal when you acknowledge it and believe that you did deserve better.

(And there can also be trauma from genuine medical issues, but that's kind of a different thing than what we're talking about here.)

The point of this book is, it's NOT true that as long as the mom and baby are healthy, everything is fine. Pregnant people deserve better than that- we deserve to be listened to and respected. We deserve to have choices. If doctors do things to you which feel traumatic and violating, and then people say it's fine because at least no one died, well, that's NOT COOL.

(Also, I've often heard moms talking about what they wish had gone differently with giving birth, from a sort of "mommy wars" perspective- ie, if you're a good mom, you should give birth without an epidural, etc. The idea that your birth experience is supposed to go a certain way, or else society will judge you and say you're a failure as a mom/ as a woman. And it can be good and healthy to just ignore society's judgment, and say "just because my experience didn't fit this 'ideal' image, doesn't mean it was bad." Yes, I agree with this advice. But this aspect of it wasn't really what was discussed in the book. It wasn't about judging one's birth experience from a "mommy wars" perspective. It was about being able to make your own choices. It was about consent.)

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Is your doctor actually working in your best interest?

In an ideal world, of course the doctors and medical staff are working in the patients' best interest. But, here in reality, sometimes patients have concerns, and doctors don't listen to them, and this leads to worse problems. Or sometimes doctors perform various medical interventions during the process of labor and giving birth (induction, C-section, forceps delivery, episiotomy, etc), and these interventions actually do more harm than good. Because of problems like this, maternal mortality rates are higher than they should be- especially for certain marginalized groups like Black women.

Why do doctors do these kinds of interventions, if the patient doesn't need it? Why not just let the patient labor by themself and give birth vaginally, and only intervene if you run into serious problems? Well, I can think of a few reasons:

  • Interventions mean the doctor is the one in control. If you're trying to have a natural delivery, who knows how long you'll be in labor? Could be hours and hours. The doctor has to wait around that whole time- this is very inconvenient for the doctor. But if you get a C-section, well, the doctor knows exactly what to do and when and exactly how long it will take. This is much better for the doctor's schedule. Rather than having a timetable that's out of their control.
  • Sometimes patients feel like nothing is happening, and it would make them feel better if the doctor would just *do something*. I think the issue there is when pregnant people are not well-informed about what labor and birth actually look like. If you have only seen it on tv, you probably expect that it all happens very fast and exciting- but actually, the reality is you'll probably be experiencing contractions for 24 hours or so, before the baby is finally born. When you're all excited and you get to the hospital and get changed into your hospital gown and they hook you up to the fetal monitoring and it's all very exciting, and then, okay, and then pretty much nothing happens. You have to just wait around, experiencing contractions for hours and hours. It's kinda boring. Sometimes patients will be unhappy with this, and will want to know, isn't there anything the doctor can do to make this faster??? And, yes, there are things the doctor can do to make it faster. But it's not a good idea to do that, if there's no actual medical reason for it. But if you're there in that situation, and you expected it to go a certain way, because you aren't well-informed about what labor actually looks like, it might make you feel better for the doctor to do things (that aren't actually necessary and might do more harm than good).
  • Doctors are afraid of getting sued. It's much more likely that they'll get sued for "you should have done something, but you did nothing"' than for doing something that maybe was not necessary and resulted in additional complications. So it's not really about what's in the patient's best interest, it's about what the doctor is more likely to get sued for.

I'm in China, and I've heard that Chinese hospitals serve such a huge number of patients, so they don't want you taking up a spot in the labor room if you're taking forever and nothing seems to be happening. After a certain amount of time, they would want to do a C-section. I gave birth at an international hospital in China so I wasn't in that kind of environment though.

And another thing that happens is, doctors tell you that there's some serious problem, and they have to do some medical procedure on you right away, or else there is a risk that your baby might die. They act like it's very urgent, and there's no time to actually understand the situation or what your options are, DO YOU WANT YOUR BABY TO DIE???? This is a very difficult situation to be in, as a patient, because you're not an expert in pregnancy complications- how do you know if it's really as serious as what the doctor is saying? Or is it just a small risk that they are blowing out of proportion? Or do they have other reasons, not related to your health or the baby's health, that they want to push you into some medical intervention? It can be really coercive.

It can help a lot, in this situation, to have a midwife or doula who is "on your side." The midwife or doula will be knowledgeable enough to know if the risk is really as great as what the doctor is saying.

Honestly, though, my opinion is, you should talk to the doctor during the pregnancy, and make sure you find a doctor you can trust. During your prenatal appointments, talk to them about what kind of birth you want to have, and see what their perspective is. Find information about what percentage of births at their hospital are vaginal vs C-section, and other statistics like that. You find a doctor you can trust, who supports the kind of birth experience you want to have, and then if they tell you there's some kind of urgent reason they need to do something that wasn't in the plan, you can trust that it's because there really is a medical reason, not because they just don't care about your plan. You don't have to be in a situation where you're second-guessing them and have no idea if your baby is actually at risk or not. (And then afterward, you always wonder if you should be grateful to the doctor for saving your baby's life, or if everything would have been fine if they had just done nothing, and they violated you and disregarded your wishes for no good reason.)

For example: When my second child was born, we had discussed with the doctor beforehand that my husband was going to cut the umbilical cord. This is apparently a thing that a lot of dads find meaningful. I don't think my husband really had a strong opinion about it though. But then, my baby came out, and the doctor was immediately saying "cut it" in Chinese, and the doctor and nurses cut the cord right away. Turns out this was because the cord was around the baby's neck, and she wasn't breathing. The doctor cut the cord and immediately handed the baby over to the other medical staff there who know how to get the baby to start breathing. (Don't worry, they got the baby to breathe.) So, the doctor didn't follow the plan, but there was a good reason for it- you don't want to be in the middle of a situation like that, and be arguing with the doctor because you don't trust that they actually cared about your plan.

It is a privilege, though, to be able to have access to a doctor you can trust like that. In some places, there are not any good options, or they are too expensive. This is so wrong- everyone should have a doctor who listens to them and is supportive.

This book talked about how women are often told they are "not allowed" to do something. That it's the hospital policy. They're "not allowed" to do skin-to-skin with the baby immediately after birth. They're "not allowed" to do delayed cord clamping. They're "not allowed" to continue laboring after a certain number of hours. They're "not allowed" to continue being pregnant past 41 weeks, they have to get induced. 

How can you be "not allowed" to do these very simple things? It's your body!

Why do we have this concept that hospitals are in charge, and they tell you what you are or aren't allowed to do with your own body? It should be that the hospital's services are a resource that pregnant people choose to use, as they make their own health care decisions.

The book makes the connection between birth trauma and sexual assault and the #metoo movement. Between the concepts of consent as it relates to sex, and consent as it relates to giving birth. Here is a quote from page 177:

Just as women were once told, 'sex is for procreation and nothing more,' they are now told, 'childbirth is for procreation and nothing more'. In either act, what matters is the production of a healthy baby, and the woman is merely a means to that end. The experience of childbirth is dismissed as meaningless and unimportant to a woman's body, heart or soul, just as the experience of sex used to be.

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Birth plans

The book said that society mocks women who make detailed birth plans- saying they are too high-maintenance, too controlling, need to be more realistic, need to learn to "go with the flow," their expectations are not reasonable, etc.

What is a birth plan? It's a document that the pregnant person writes, to communicate their preferences for how they want labor and birth to go. When I was pregnant, I read online that I should write one, so I did, and I brought it to a prenatal appointment to show the doctor. He read it and basically said yeah all of it is fine, it's all consistent with hospital policy. Then we didn't really discuss the birth plan again, and then during the actual birth, a bunch of things did not go according to plan, but I was okay with that because I did trust the doctors and nurses to respect me and my choices.

You should do this if you are pregnant. You should write a birth plan and discuss it with your doctor, well before the actual birth. Milli Hill also thinks so, and says it is not cool how women get mocked for expecting doctors to care about their birth plans. There's this caricature of a pregnant woman being really unrealistic about her birth plan- don't you know that sometimes things go wrong? Don't you know that birth isn't really something that can be planned down to the last detail?

Okay, people who mock birth plans are really misrepresenting the whole thing. Making a birth plan doesn't mean you're in denial of the fact that things don't always go according to plan. It's about communicating what you want. There are plenty of things that are extremely reasonable, that it's best to communicate with the hospital beforehand. Who do you want to be with you when you give birth? Do you want to bounce on a yoga ball during labor? Ask the hospital whether they provide a yoga ball. 

Making a birth plan isn't like, you actually believe it's going to happen that way, just because you wrote it down. It's about communicating with the medical staff about your preferences and your choices. Yes, you absolutely should have a birth plan.

Here's a quote from page 53 about women feeling bad for "getting their hopes up":

Interestingly, and also in common with other forms of violence against women, it is often the woman who is left carrying the blame and shame in the aftermath. Just as the woman who has been attacked may feel that the clothes she wore or the route she took home at the end of the night may have contributed to her violation, women traumatised by birth will spend the days, weeks or even years afterwards going over the events in fine detail and asking, 'What could I have done differently?' And, just as men are rarely asked to reflect on what they could do to reduce violence against women there is similarly considerably less postnatal analysis - and often none at all - done by the individuals, institutions and systems that inflict birth trauma. Women are left with the shameful reflection that they 'should not have got their hopes up', 'should not have made a birth plan', or 'should have just gone with the flow' and those messages are consistently reinforced in popular culture. Those who try to take control of their births, and antenatal courses and teachers who encourage them to believe they can do so, are consistently derided and mocked. 'Yes,' the woman thinks to herself, 'I was totally unrealistic to think I could have a positive experience of birth, and that is why I now feel so awful. It is my fault I feel this way.' This is victim-blaming, pure and simple.

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She is more of a "hippie" than me

It's very clear that the author, Hill, personally believes home birth is better than hospital birth. There are statistics in the book about how only a very low percentage of women are having home births, and this is presented as a bad thing. Also, the book talks about how many medical professionals have only experienced birth in a hospital setting, isn't it sad that they don't even know what their patients are missing out on.

Also, there's a lot of language in here about pregnant women being naked and roaring and powerful. I'm not really... that's not really my thing. I'm not into the idea of feeling powerful and "trusting my body" while giving birth. I already grew the whole baby during the pregnancy, that's already impressive and "powerful" enough, I don't also need the birth to be like that. I want to be with doctors and nurses who know what they're doing. Make it easy for me.

I mean, if I was stranded at a truck stop and had to give birth there, I would encourage myself with talk of my powerful feminine energy, but thank goodness I never had to do that. Let's avoid that if possible.

My opinion is, I don't really believe in this talk about "trust your body" and "women's bodies are made to do this" (the book uses language like, hospital birth is based on the belief that "women's bodies don't really work"). Because, yes, sure, giving birth is natural and the body has processes that handle it- but from an evolutionary perspective, that only has to "work" at a rate high enough so humanity as a species can continue. It's not something that I as an individual woman can rely on. Giving birth is natural, but dying in childbirth is also natural. I don't want to take my chances on that; I want a doctor who knows what they're doing.

Note, though, that actually studies have shown that home birth is just as safe as hospital birth- if there is a midwife present at the home birth who knows how to recognize when you need professional help, and you have a backup plan about how to get to the hospital if necessary. So, sure, okay, I guess it makes sense that some pregnant people would want to do it that way, but I very much do not.

Even though the author clearly has a preference for home birth (and being naked and roaring, etc), the book repeatedly emphasizes that this is about supporting all women's choices in childbirth. It's NOT about saying one type of birth is "better." The book says we should support women along the whole entire spectrum of options- from home birth to elective C-section.

Here's a quote from page 13:

We also need to talk about those women who don't want or cannot have straightforward vaginal births. There is literally not one single birth scenario in which increasing empathy for the woman, listening to her voice, respecting her decisions, and honouring that this is an extraordinary day in her life will not be valid. There is literally not one single type of birth that we cannot improve upon. The best way to find out more about this is again to listen to women. I learned so much about what women want in birth from talking to those those have experienced caesarean, and in particular, caesarean under general anesthetic - often the most difficult birth experience to process and recover from. From them I learned that the smallest of gestures can make the biggest and most life-changing differences. Taking a few moments to photograph the newborn on their mother's chest, for example, even if she is still unconscious, will create something she will treasure for a lifetime, a tangible antidote to her trauma. Women repeat again and again how much it means to them to know that their hands were among the first to touch their baby, even if they were not 'there' to experience it. Every small gesture matters, and we can always do better.

Yes! Totally agree with this! It is absolutely NOT true that if some kind of emergency comes up and you can't have a birth according to your birth plan, then you have no choices or consent at all and the doctors take over everything. This example of the C-section under general anesthesia- this would happen only in very rare cases, when there's such an extreme emergency and the baby has to be born right away, and there's not even time to do an epidural; the only way to give the pregnant person anesthesia fast enough is to use general anesthesia. Being asleep while your baby is born, yeah, that would be traumatic. I definitely see how it can help, to take a photo of the baby on the mother's chest, and other little gestures like that.

Don't view it like the "home birth" end of the spectrum is the "respecting women's choices and consent" end, and the "hospitalized birth" end of the spectrum is less so. No, at every point along the spectrum, no matter what kind of birth you end up having, even if legitimate medical problems mean it ends up having more interventions than you originally wanted- every birth can be improved by doctors respecting the pregnant person and caring about their choices.

So yes, the book says sometimes there are circumstances where you really do need a doctor. Doctors are experts in medical interventions for pregnancy complications- which are sometimes necessary to save lives- and midwives are experts in how pregnant people's bodies are meant to naturally give birth, and how to support them in that. Doctors and midwives both have important expertise, and they should learn from each other.

Yeah, throughout human history, the midwife role has been very important. And women knew about how childbirth worked because they were there to support the other women in their family who gave birth. But that knowledge is not really being passed down any more. It's really common for women to not really have any idea about the reality of what childbirth looks like, until they're actually pregnant themselves. It's very common to feel like it's unbelievable that a whole entire baby can come out of a vagina- how on earth would that even work? Doesn't feel realistic, does it?

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What about doctors not being comfortable with participating in scenarios they feel are too risky?

The idea that pregnant people should have doctors or midwives supporting them in whatever choice they make for the birth- I'm wondering about the details for how that would work. 

For example, suppose an unborn baby is in the breech position (ie, the baby's head is not pointing down). Now, this would make vaginal birth more risky- and as far as I know, most doctors would be unwilling to try for a vaginal birth in this case. They would say you have to have a C-section. But if the pregnant person wants to have a vaginal birth- well, what should happen? Doctors refuse to try for a vaginal birth not because they are being mean and not supporting women, but because they know that vaginal breech birth is more difficult and risky, and they feel that they don't have enough experience and knowledge about this specific situation to be confident that they would do a good job. Seriously, if you're pregnant and your baby is breech and you want to have a vaginal birth, I don't think you should try to talk *your* doctor into it, I think you should *find* a doctor who is experienced and confident with vaginal breech births.

I wonder about this... and the book didn't talk about it, so I don't really know whether my speculation matches reality or not, but, don't you think it would be traumatic for a doctor, if the patient insists on something the doctor believes is a serious risk to the baby's life- how can you force the doctor to participate in that? I mean, I guess to some extent that *is* their job, they can give recommendations but at the end of the day they provide the medical service that the patient chooses, not necessarily the one that the doctor thinks is best. But for something like vaginal breech birth, I wonder if doctors feel they don't have the training to do a good job with it- and the pregnant person and baby deserve to have a doctor who is trained enough to do a good job.

So it can't be like, you force doctors to participate in something they think is a bad idea. It should be like, even if most doctors don't want to be involved, there at least exists *somebody* who says "yes, I will support the patient in this" and society should allow pregnant people to use their services. (The book had examples of midwife organizations being shut down for shaky reasons- so, don't do that, allow the midwives to continue doing their work.)

But wait, what if that "somebody"- who says yes to whatever choice a pregnant person makes- is a quack? Shouldn't society require some kind of certification for these people? You can't let quacks and "influencers" give pregnant people misinformation about how this or that serious pregnancy complication is not actually a problem and you just have to trust in your feminine energy or whatever.

I agree with the idea that pregnant people should be supported along the whole entire spectrum of choices- but how can you make sure it's really an informed choice? Like, yes, if you want to have a home birth, or other things I personally think are a bad idea, because you are well-informed about it and you know what you're doing, I totally support that. But if you want to have a home birth because somebody in a facebook group said that pregnancy and childbirth carry no risks at all, well, yikes.

Like, how would this 'making sure all pregnant people's choices are supported' work? Who do you give midwife certification to? There has to be some kind of vetting. And I think the answer is, the standards for midwife certification should be created by experienced midwives who know what's what. So it's not that 'it's impossible to draw a line, so don't even try'- it should be that a line is drawn by people who know what they're doing.

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This is a feminist issue- but it's difficult

The book emphasizes that this is a feminist issue. Yes! I agree! Birth trauma is a feminist issue, and we should talk about it more. On pages 88-89, Hill speculates that maybe this is difficult to talk about because people who have bad experiences during birth tell themselves that there were reasons that it had to be that way- and to find out that actually it didn't have to be that way, and they deserved better, can be traumatic:

To say that we are not powerless in birth can be extremely triggering for those women who feel that they absolutely were, and this alone could explain the lack of feminist attention to the birth experience. Such a large percentage of women have had utterly dreadful birth experiences in the past few decades, and they're been given these experiences in a well-rehearsed cultural package bound up neatly with the ribbon of unwavering faith in medical science to rescue them from their inadequate bodies. And the bow on top is the repeated mantra that a healthy baby is all that matters, setting them up for a lifetime of reluctance to question whether their experience could have been less traumatic, could have been different, could even have been glorious.

Anyone who talks about birth in positive terms, therefore, can face a huge backlash, which often seems to me to come from a very hurt place, a wound in women that is often both personal and cultural. I felt the pain of it myself, when, after my first hospital forceps birth, a friend, who had been pregnant at the same time, had the easy home birth that I had been hoping for. I can still remember where I was when I heard the news, and it floored me. I felt gutted - and yes I know that some people will try to tell me that this was simply because I had been set up to view one kind of birth as somehow 'better' than the other, that I felt I had failed the test somehow, and my home birth friend had passed it. But I was not gutted because I had had my silly head filled with unrealistic ideas of the perfect birth - far from it. I was gutted because I was traumatised. I hated to think about her birth because it brought up so many 'what if' questions about mine. I was so deeply wounded by my own birth that it was almost unbearable to think that it could have been different for me.

But also, to me it feels sort of more difficult and complicated than other issues. Because, doesn't it feel like there is an argument to be made that pregnant people *shouldn't* be allowed to do things which put their unborn baby in serious danger?

Or, to put it another way, as far as reasons go for restricting women's choices/ telling them what they're "allowed" to do with their own bodies, saving a baby's life seems like a really good reason. Childbirth truly is risky. Before the era of modern medicine, people were dying in childbirth all the time.

But, maybe every feminist issue used to feel complicated. Maybe people used to feel like "well there are plenty of good reasons for not letting women [vote/ have a bank account/ get divorced/ etc]," and now that feminists have been talking about these issues for so long, they no longer feel "complicated." They feel obvious.

The book said that there's a big connection between "pro-life" ideology and controlling women's choices during childbirth. I feel like, superficially this seems surprising- isn't "pro-life" about wanting to have a baby, and "pro-choice" is about wanting to kill one's unborn baby- and so women who are giving birth are on the "wanting to have a baby" side of that, ie, the "pro-life" side. That's how I would have thought about it, years ago when I was evangelical and "pro-life."

But the way I see it now is more like this: "Pro-choice" is about supporting people's choices related to their own health and their own bodies. If they want to be pregnant, we support that, and if they want to have an abortion, we support that. But "pro-life" is based on the idea that women can't be trusted to make their own choices, so we need the government to make laws to force them.

Page 36 says:

Some may feel that a pregnant woman should not have the right to make a decision that puts her baby 'at risk', but, unfortunately, as unpleasant as it may sound, the unborn child can never and should never be considered to have any rights - and as soon as we put so much as a toe in this water, we begin to stray into a place in which a woman can be taken from her house by the police and compelled to undergo major surgery against her wishes. [Earlier in this chapter, there was an account of a Brazilian woman who was taken by police and given a C-section because of a court order.] There is a creeping nature to such a mindset - once we begin to make provision for the occasions when doctors or the state may overrule a pregnant woman with full mental capacity, we are on a very slippery slope indeed. Instead, the point needs to be made clear, often over and over again, that we have to trust women to be the ultimate decision maker in birth, no matter what.

I think... I think it's difficult, and this is something you should really think through rather than just agreeing with it because it's the "pro-choice" or "feminist" opinion on it. But basically yeah I do agree with what the book is saying there. It has to be the pregnant person who is making the decisions. 

Even though pregnant people might sometimes do a bad job of making decisions, there's nobody else you could pick who would do better. Sure, we can think of hypotheticals where a pregnant person decides to do something which is a really bad idea, and they or their baby might die as a result- but there are also plenty of cases where the government makes bad decisions for pregnant people- and that would happen far more frequently.

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It's such a scam that they've got us believing women are weaker

Can I just say, it's such a scam that society has us believing that women are weaker than men. Seriously! Women/ people with a uterus are the ones who make new people. We create life! And we have to deal with menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth. Even a healthy pregnancy is extremely difficult, very hard to go through. Cis men don't have any kind of equivalent difficulty that their bodies go through. If cis men are healthy, their reproductive organs never give them any trouble. IMAGINE. Blew my mind when I realized that. Can you believe patriarchy has really tricked us into thinking women are weaker than men?

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It's hard for me to get my head around the idea that these unpleasant but normal medical procedures violate patients' rights

When you are in labor, you might have all manner of people sticking their fingers in your vagina to check how dilated your cervix is. (This is called a vaginal exam.) *I* personally did not have "all manner of people", just 1 doctor, but yeah it is common that women report having all manner of people sticking their fingers in the woman's vagina.

Here's the purpose of the vaginal exam: During the process of labor, the cervix opens in order to let the baby come out. This could take hours and hours. Doctors feel that it's useful to do a vaginal exam to check how far the cervix has opened- this gives you a sense of how far along you are in the process. But it's not *necessary* to do it. You could just labor without knowing how dilated your cervix is, and then when you have a feeling like you want to push the baby out, that's how you know it's time to push the baby out. (Note that when the pregnant person has an epidural, they might not be able to feel this feeling of knowing it's time to push.)

So the vaginal exams are not medically necessary. But patients often like to know their progress, so they want to do them. But some patients do not want to do vaginal exams- and they should absolutely be allowed to say no. It's your vagina! You're not *required* to let people stick their fingers in there, wtf.

Page 38-39 says:

The interesting thing about VEs is that they are completely optional - but not a lot of people know this. You would think it would be obvious - of course nobody can put their fingers inside your vagina if you don't want them to, right? But the majority of women are unaware that they are perfectly entitled to decline. Furthermore, some women report a nagging sense that they are entitled to decline, but are unable to voice their refusal, whereas others do manage to decline but are then either directly or indirectly coerced, for example by being told they cannot be admitted to the ward or use the birth pool unless they comply, or by simply being told they 'have to' - which is of course incorrect, as you don't 'have to' allow anything to happen to your body against your wishes. Still others consent to the VE but are told afterwards that their midwife or doctor gave them a 'sweep' or broke their waters 'while they were in there'. Women to whom this happens report finding it extremely violating and yet rarely complain formally about it, perhaps because there is a widespread and unspoken acceptance that maternity care requires you to 'leave your dignity at the door' and can at times be violating by its very nature.

And I also want to put a few quotes here about doctors respecting patients and how that can come across as unusual. From page 276-277:

What is also at risk of happening is women who, for whatever reason, can no longer have the straightforward birth they really wanted, feeling like they no longer have any rights or choices. As some put it, 'the birth plan went out the window'. On the contrary, when those situations that truly do require medical help arise, respectful care means continuing to keep women and their feelings at the heart of every action. Nothing illustrates this better than the many examples of clinicians trying to raise levels of empathy in highly medicalised settings. In Nottingham, obstetrician Andy Sim has been one of the pioneers of 'woman-centered caesarean,' which shifts the focus of surgical birth away from clinicians 'doing their job' and towards the woman as the pivotal character in the drama. ... One of Andy's 'small' changes - which of course any woman may ask to be part of her caesarean - is that, while the catheter is being inserted, theatre staff who are not needed for that procedure go and stand at the woman's head. When I've told people about this option, many will look a bit baffled and ask - why? Perhaps their first assumption is that there is a complex medical reason for the doctor's actions, but in fact the answer is simple - it's entirely about the woman's dignity. This seemingly small act of kindness says: 'We, the medical team, are thinking about what this is like for you, the person giving birth.' It's a sudden flash of empathy for how a woman, on the threshold of becoming a mother, may feel at that moment as an area of her body that is usually kept private is exposed. And it's an acknowledgement that in birth, everything is remembered, and everything 'matters'. Perhaps people are initially baffled by this because we're simply not used to the concept of building the activity in the birth room around the needs of the woman.

And this one from page 267:

As Hermine Hayes-Klein put it to me: 'How much would it change in the birth room if everybody in that room really understood that the woman could not be touched without her permission - this would be transformative. And the fact that it would be transformative tells you everything you need to know about how informed consent is routinely ignored in current maternity care systems.'

Yeah... I feel like, for me, it's hard to get my head around the idea that... like... it is right to limit how much medical staff look at patients' "private parts" and/or touch patients in intimate, invasive ways. Because, isn't that how it always is with doctors? Like, of course I don't want strangers looking at me or touching me like that- but if it's a doctor, then you have to, that's just how it is with doctors. 

I don't really know how to put my thoughts into words on this... I really like what these sections of the book were saying, but I just can't see how to fit in into my understanding of what medical care even is.

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I pay the big bucks for the international hospital

In China, I always go to international hospitals for my medical care, because they have standards for bedside manner, patient privacy, etc, which match what I'm used to from the US. I have had bad experiences in Chinese hospitals. Chinese hospitals are very good at giving you the medical treatment you need, but don't do anything about caring for your emotions surrounding it.

This was especially important to me when I was pregnant, because I've heard things about Chinese hospitals- like they will push you into having a C-section if they think you're taking too long, male partners aren't allowed in the labor rooms, you get treated as just an object in a system instead of a person- that kind of stuff. (In some cases, the reason they don't allow your partner to come to the labor room is that it's not just you- there will be other women also laboring in the same room. You don't want *other people's* male partners in the labor room with you. In some cases, though, it's a private room, and I have no idea what the justification is there.) 

These things won't be true of all Chinese hospitals- there is a huge range. (And there are public hospitals, private hospitals, international hospitals, VIP departments in public hospitals- all of which will give you a different kind of experience.) And sure, plenty of people report having good experiences at Chinese public hospitals too. 

Anyway MY POINT IS, I pay the big bucks to go to the international hospital. 

Yes, it is much more expensive. Not everyone has access to that kind of medical care. And that's the problem.

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This book is not trans-inclusive

I have to put a warning here, for readers who are trans/nonbinary/queer, that the language used in this book is not inclusive of trans people. The book constantly refers to people who give birth as women, constantly talks about how this is a women's issue, etc- and yes, that is true, this is a women's issue- but *not* all people who give birth are women. Trans and nonbinary people exist. I think it's better to use language like "women and/or people who give birth" but this book doesn't do that, it's always just "women."

... Oh, oh dear, I just did a little googling and found the author's substack and it's, ahem, not really trans-friendly. Oh wow, I'm actually really shocked to see that- because trans rights are all about trans people being allowed to make their own decisions about their medical care, rather than having the government/ gatekeepers/ conservative politicians/ etc decide what kind of medical care they're "allowed" to have. And isn't that the exact same thing that "Give Birth Like a Feminist" is about?

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Conclusion

The topic of what consent should look like in a medical context is extremely important to me. And giving birth is one area where a lot of people have trauma due to disrespect and lack of consent. The message of "Give Birth Like a Feminist" is that women deserve better than that. Yes! You have choices! It's your body! But society and the medical system treat women like they are being unreasonable for "getting their hopes up" and expecting that their choices will be respected during childbirth. This definitely is a feminist issue that we should be talking about.

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Related:

A Comprehensive Pro-Choice Ethic

"Expecting Better": Asking the Right Questions About Pregnancy 

I Had Pre-Eclampsia

"Queer Conception" (book review) 

So I Got the Epidural

"Afraid of the Doctor" (I read this book because I have medical trauma)

I Don't Want My Baby To Be "Brave"

Doctors (part 3 of Autism & Teaching Kids to Protect Themselves)


Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Social justice and empiricism (June 27) "Social justice could be understood, derogatorily, as a series of rules.  You can’t use this word as a noun, only as an adjective.  You can’t use that word, unless you have a certain ethnic identity.  Here’s a long list of things that must be marked with trigger warnings.  You must include representation of minority groups within any work of fiction, but you’re also not allowed to do that without getting input from the represented group.  I think this must feel constraining to people, like they’re not allowed to think and form their own opinion, they’re only allowed to give in to an inconsistent set of demands."

2. Impossible for Men, Unremarkable for Women (2022) "The assumption that women generally don’t experience sexual attraction (and therefore ace women are unremarkable) coexists with the assumption that women should (selectively) provide sex (to men)."

3. Wingnuts Exactly As Calm As You'd Expect Over Mamdani's NYC Primary Win (June 28) I saw this a few days ago and didn't really pay much attention to it, it's just the typical unhinged hate we always see from extremely-online MAGAs. But then I realized, these people are saying that no Muslim should ever be in a leadership position ever, because that would be the same thing as 9/11. This is absolutely bonkers and inexcusable. If you ever see any of these people's names in the future, in some kind of context where they're being presented as serious people worth listening to, well, don't forget this.

4. Supreme Court's conservatives give "defund" Planned Parenthood efforts a win (June 27) "On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservatives blocked Medicaid recipients from suing South Carolina over its decision to reject Planned Parenthood as a covered Medicaid provider."

Now is a good time to donate to Planned Parenthood.

5. Hard to imagine a worse time to deport Afghan refugees, human rights advocates say (June 28) "But this year, Iran and Pakistan have stepped up the deportations."

6. 200,000 March In Budapest Pride, Refusing To Capitulate To Anti-LGBTQ+ Law (June 29) "In the face of mounting attacks, it’s easy for LGBTQ+ people in the United States to feel crushed beneath the weight of it all. But moments like Budapest remind us that even under the most repressive regimes, our communities still rise."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. SCOTUS conservatives end "universal injunctions" in birthright citizenship cases (June 28) "The majority, Jackson wrote authorized a 'zone of lawlessness' with its ruling. In one zone, she wrote, 'law reigns' through court rulings protecting 'named plaintiffs.' In the second zone, however, the executive can enforce unconstitutional actions against 'those who lack the wherewithal or ability to go to court' — a reality that 'will disproportionately impact the poor, the uneducated, and the unpopular.'"

The Supreme Court did not actually rule on the question of birthright citizenship. They just ruled that the president can issue a blatantly unconstitutional order, which causes very real problems in people's lives, and federal courts can't block it, they can only say it doesn't apply to whoever brings a case to court about it.

We'll have to see how this goes. It seems untenable.

Also: What is birthright citizenship and what happens after the Supreme Court ruling? (June 27) "The strategic shift required three court filings: one to add class allegations to the initial complaint; a second to move for class certification; and a third asking a district court in Maryland to issue 'a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction asking for relief for that putative class,' Powell said."

2. The Trump administration is building a national citizenship data system (June 29) The claim is that this can help states check their voter rolls for any non-citizens trying to vote. On the one hand I'm like "yeah there *should* be a way to easily check if someone is a citizen, for voting" but on the other hand I don't trust these clowns.

Also, what happened to the subculture of conservative Christians who always come out in droves to protest any kind of centralized system like this, because it's "the mark of the beast" that the "antichrist" is forcing on everybody?

3. USAID cuts could lead to 14 million deaths over the next five years, researchers say (June 30, via) "'The numbers are striking, but we are not the only group that did this kind of analysis,' said Davide Rasella, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, who coordinated the study. Other research groups, he said, 'came up with similar magnitudes — millions and millions of deaths that will be caused by the defunding of USAID.'"

4. DOJ announces plans to prioritize cases to revoke citizenship (June 30) The example in this article is someone who was convicted of distributing child sexual abuse material. Okay, I agree there is a case to be made for revoking citizenship for someone who committed a serious crime. But I don't trust these MAGAs at all. This plan to "prioritize" revoking citizenship, it's not about law or justice. It comes across like they're trying to come up with any reason they can to deport large numbers of people.

Sunday, June 29, 2025

Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

A chart showing the descendants of Adam, in the bible. Image source.

I recently read "Genesis for Normal People," and I want to talk about the story of Cain.

This story is from Genesis 4. Adam and Eve (the first humans) have 2 sons: Cain and Abel. Cain murders Abel. And then the part I want to talk about is what happens after that. 

As punishment for murdering Abel, God says that Cain will have to wander the earth. Cain is really not happy about this- he is afraid that "whoever finds me will kill me." So God puts a mark of some kind on him to tell people not to kill him. Then Cain moves away, and he and his wife have a child, and he builds a city.

"Genesis for Normal People" says this (page 33):

If you have ever read this story to inquisitive children, you know what's coming next-- the dreaded question that terrified Sunday School teachers pray is never asked: "Where did Cain get his wife from?" (I don't know, Susie. Ask your parents.) Along with that question, we can also add, "Where did this posse come from that Cain is so afraid of, and why exactly would one man in exile build a city?"

Even children recognize that if Adam and Eve were the first humans, and if Cain and Abel were their children, and if Abel is dead-- that leaves three people on earth. So Genesis 4 just drops a bunch of other people in our laps without bothering to explain where they came from.

Some, who still want to read Genesis 2-4 as another account of creation, find an answer in Genesis 5:4, where we learn that Adam had "other sons and daughters." So are we supposed to believe that Cain married his sister? Besides the fact that that's gross and a little creepy, let's also remember the story doesn't say that or even suggest it. That is a made-up explanation. And besides, Genesis 5:4 seems to say that these other children were born after Seth, Adam and Eve's replacement child for Abel-- all of that happened after the banishment of Cain and his marriage to his mysterious wife. And finally, think about this: for Cain to find a wife among his sisters while wandering around as a fugitive would mean that at least one sister (actually, a lot of brothers and sisters since Cain builds a city) would have been banished too. But again, the story doesn't say any of that.

Here's a simpler explanation: there were other people living outside of the Garden of Eden all along, even if the story doesn't explain it. Which leads to this: maybe the story of Adam and Eve isn't about the first human beings. Maybe it's about something else. And that something else is this:

The Adam story is a story of Israel in miniature, a preview of coming attractions.

!!!!!! Oh, yes, I read all the apologetics books back in the day, and yes they certainly do talk about the question "where did Cain get his wife?" The answer that's given in the apologetics books is: Cain must have married his sister or niece. And this was okay back then because Adam and Eve had completely perfect genes. But later, many many generations after Adam and Eve, the effects of sin in the world had caused more and more mutations in people's genes- so incest is a bad idea now, but back then at the creation of the world, it was fine.

Yes, really, if you believe that Adam and Eve were the first 2 people, and everyone is descended from them, then you have to get into these fan theories about how sin causes genetic mutations. You have to make arguments that incest was okay back then but not okay now.

"Genesis for Normal People" points out that NONE OF THAT IS IN THE BIBLE! The bible does NOT say "Cain married his sister." People just made that up because it follows logically from Adam and Eve being the only people on earth originally. But don't take it that seriously! It's not a true story!

It's just FASCINATING how Christians go from "I believe the bible" to "incest was okay during the time of Adam and Eve and I will die on this hill" when the bible doesn't say that at all! It doesn't!

(I mean, if you want actual bible stories about incest: Abraham and Sarah were half-brother/half-sister. Jacob married his cousins Rachel and Leah. The bible has incest. But the story of Cain doesn't, unless you need it as part of your fan theories.)

When you believe in inerrancy, and you read the bible, you see things in the stories that actually aren't there. Like the incest in the story of Cain. 

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Posts about "Genesis for Normal People":

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"
God Made the Firmament
When the Bible is Racist
To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

Related

Children's Bibles and "turning ambiguity into clear articulations" 

Cain and Family (A Logic Problem) 

The Bible and the Pixar Theory

Saturday, June 28, 2025

"The Case for Open Borders": Stay at home

Migrant children. Image source.

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". From pages 139-140:

A number of refrains were repeated in the first half of 2021 as the Biden administration explained that they were working to reinstate the asylum and refugee programs that the Trump administration had gutted: "It takes time," "We're working on it," and, simply, "Do not come." The president, the vice president, the press secretary, and dozens of officials repeated the messages, primarily to Mexicans and Central Americans: Stay at home, Quédate en casa. But you can't ask someone whose home was destroyed by a hurricane to stay at home. You can't ask a parent whose child is hungry to wait a few months. You can't ask someone running for their lives to slow down to a walk.




Friday, June 27, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Court fails transgender youth (June 23) "If the law treats you differently than it treats someone else, there has to be a reason for it. And the reason can’t just be that the people who make the laws don’t like you."

2. Repentance Theater and the Evangelical Closet (June 24) [content note: sexual assault mention] "Let’s be honest. If Tait had come out years ago as a gay man, even one striving to live in harmony with his faith, he would’ve been excommunicated by CCM and booted off Christian radio so fast, his dreadlocks would’ve flown off." Very true.

3. GOP Lawmaker Nearly Dies Due to Abortion Ban—Then Blames the Left (June 24) "But Florida’s six-week abortion ban, which had just been enacted, made those medical professionals hesitant to save Cammack’s life because they feared they’d lose their licenses, or even be prosecuted and sent to jail."

4. Microbial evolution…in spaaaace! (June 21) "Anyway, they swabbed the crew quarters and discovered a novel bacterial species, Niallia tiangongensis."

5. Farads (June 23) From xkcd.

6. Zohran Mamdani Beats Andrew Cuomo for NY Mayoral Bid—Without Abandoning Trans People (June 25) "Mamdani is also the only mayoral candidate out of the crowded Democratic pool who appears to have participated in the protests against NYC hospitals complying in advance to Trump’s anti-trans health care legal threats."

7. Journal Club: Asexuality and Birth Order Effects (June 26) "We thought it might be too early read into the particulars of the results."

8. How many kids go to work instead of school? (June 26) "Asia has embraced that philosophy with positive results. The percentage of children who work has dropped from 13% in 2008 to just 3% in 2024 — from 114 million to 28 million."

9. “No War Here”: The Iranian Couple Who Escaped Conflict to Sell Out at China Expo (June 25) "'Everyone simply wanted to help a couple who had gone through so much to come here from a war-torn country,' Sun said. 'They just wanted to make a little money, and we were all willing to help fulfill that wish.'"

Also from Sixth Tone: Second Life: China’s Top Resale App Now Fuels Its Wildest Gig Market (June 27) "For 40 yuan ($6) an hour, Huang Mingyu hired a 25-year-old to roam the streets of a small city in eastern China, asking strangers if they’d seen her missing bird."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. What Should You Do if ICE Comes to Your Restaurant? (June 23, via) "While you’re recording, say all the things like You don’t have a warrant. We don’t authorize you to be here."

2. Stop asking the wrong question. Be a neighbor. (June 25) "Here, as ever and as always, the most important question is the one asked 2,000 years ago by an unnamed Bible scholar talking to Jesus of Nazareth: 'Who is my neighbor?'"

3. ICE is Helping Predators Scam Immigrants (June 18) "In the case of undocumented immigrants who sought out the con artists specifically because they do not – can not – trust American law enforcement officers to abide by the law and protect their rights, how can we expect them to go to the police, or the FBI, or even their local city council meetings? We as a society have abandoned them, and an abandoned person is just fresh meat for the next predator to come along."

4. ICE arrested a 6-year-old boy with leukemia at immigration court. His family is suing. (June 25) "'Hundreds, if not thousands, of law-abiding noncitizens have been arrested in immigration courts in recent weeks, despite a federal court ruling that the new ICE courthouse arrest policy is unlawful and unconstitutional,' she said. 'Targeting children under this policy is simply unconscionable.'"

5. Kilmar Abrego Garcia to stay in jail as lawyers spar over potential deportation if he is released pending trial (June 25) "At bottom, the government asks the court to save it from itself because it may suffer irreparable harm completely of its own making."

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

On Living Far Away From One's Family For Financial Reasons

Cruise ship. Image source.

I have a couple anecdotes to share about families where one or both parents live in a different city from their children, in order to make more money, because there aren't good enough job opportunities in their hometown.

This is a well-known phenomenon in China. They are called "migrant workers" and "left behind children." It sounds awful, being away from your kids, only able to see them once a year- but it's inevitable that this happens, because of the economic disparity between the big cities and the countryside in China. In big cities like Shanghai (where I live), the salaries are higher and the cost of living is higher. In small cities or rural areas, salaries are lower and the cost of living is lower. So, mathematically, the way to earn the most money for one's family is for a parent to live in a big city and earn a higher salary, while the child stays in their hometown where the cost of living is lower. This kind of situation is always going to exist when there is such a big economic gap between different places.

I have several anecdotes about what I've seen in Asia:

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When I was in college in the US, I had a friend who was an international student from China, let's call her Anna. She helped me a lot with studying Chinese. At one point, she told me about a movie called "Last Train Home," which is about Chinese migrant workers traveling home for Chinese New Year. They only get to see their children 1 time out of the whole year. Anna organized a film screening in one of the classrooms on campus, and a bunch of us got together and watched this movie.

Unfortunately, I didn't really have any empathy about it, back then. My feelings were "why are we supposed to feel bad for these people who are only able to see their children once a year? They chose to move to a different city. Nobody was forcing them. They shouldn't have done that." I had a sort of "family values" mindset where we imagine what a "family" is supposed to look like, and if anyone can't live up to that, we naively blame them and say it's because they didn't value their family enough.

And also, I had sort of a "just world fallacy" thing going on. I didn't want to believe that we really live in a world where, for some parents in some places, there is actually a convincing argument to be made that "maybe the best thing I can do for my children is move far away, and leave them behind, and earn more money and send it back so they can have a better life." That's really awful to think about. It's really awful to face the reality that some people truly are in that situation. That, in some places in China, it's extremely normal for the parents to be gone, and the children are raised by other relatives and only get to see their parents once a year.

I didn't want to believe that that was real, so I just thought to myself "I would never do that" and decided that the parents in "Last Train Home" should just simply have not moved away from their children. Like it was that easy.

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Sometimes I see "heartwarming" short videos on Chinese social media about parents who make such long and difficult journeys home to see their kids for Chinese New Year. I feel these are in the same genre as American news articles about "these kids got together and had a bake sale to pay off their classmates' school lunch debt" or "these employees all donated their vacation time so that their pregnant colleague could have maternity leave, how heartwarming." It's not heartwarming- it's messed-up that this situation even exists in the first place.

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Years ago, at a previous job, working as a software engineer in Shanghai, I had a coworker whose wife and child lived in a different city near Shanghai. This coworker would live in Shanghai from Monday to Friday, and go home on the weekends to be with his wife and child. This is a thing that people do, because you can get a better salary and better job opportunities in Shanghai than in other nearby cities.

That was before covid. Now that covid has made it more normal to work from home, I think someone in that situation should try to make an arrangement with their employer where they always work from home on Mondays or Fridays, so they only have to be in Shanghai 4 days out of the week, instead of 5. (I know that in the US, many jobs are fully remote now, because of the societal changes that came with covid, but I haven't heard of fully-remote jobs in China.)

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I have an American friend in Shanghai, let's call her Chelsea. Her husband is Chinese, and his parents live in a different city.

When Chelsea was pregnant, she told me, "my mother-in-law says we can send the baby to live with her?????"

And I said, "Make sure you make it very clear that your answer is NO. Because she's not joking about that."

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Since both me and my husband have full time jobs and don't really want to do housework, we hire an ayi. "Ayi" is what female nannies/ maids/ domestic workers are called in China. It's common for people at our income level to hire an ayi to do housework/cooking/childcare.

We had always hired Chinese ayis before, but at one point, around the time our second child was born, we decided to hire a Filipino ayi. The situation with Filipino ayis is, it's not legal for them to work in this job in China. But, there is demand for them, because they speak English. International people, like me, want to hire Filipino ayis because they speak English so it's easier for me to communicate with them. Chinese people want to hire Filipino ayis who will talk to their kids in English, to help the kids learn. Filipino ayis are generally believed to be better trained and more hard-working, compared to Chinese ayis.

Anyway, we found a Filipino ayi, let's call her Brenda. When we first had her come for a job interview, she told us about her legal situation- she entered China on a tourist visa, and overstayed it, and that was years ago. She has no valid Chinese visa. It's illegal for her to still be in China. She hasn't traveled back to the Philippines, because then she wouldn't be able to enter China again. Within China, she doesn't travel on trains or planes because there's a possibility that they might discover she doesn't have a valid visa. If she has to travel somewhere, she has to ride in somebody's car.

She said that at one of her previous jobs, the family that employed her heard that police were in the area looking for Filipinos working illegally, so they warned her about it and she had to move elsewhere and find a different job.

I felt bad for her, but also I believe that feeling bad for someone is not a good reason to hire them, because then you'll have weird emotions about how you're doing such a noble thing for them, and you expect them to perform gratefulness, etc. Weird strings attached.

Also, I wasn't sure about it, because I felt I didn't clearly understand the legal situation enough to know whether I was putting myself at risk. I'm an immigrant in China too. I don't want to get in trouble. 

But, I also wanted to find out more about Filipino ayis who work in China. 

But also, Brenda didn't have any experience caring for newborn babies, and I knew in the long term I would need an ayi to take care of the baby full-time when my maternity leave ended. Brenda wouldn't be the right person for that. (In China, daycares typically start at around age 2. Before that, usually people get a grandparent to come and take care of the baby while the parents are at work, or hire an ayi.)

Anyway, we decided to hire Brenda temporarily- and I told her this pretty early on- I said she would probably work for us just a few months, and then we would need to find someone else who had experience with newborn babies.

Brenda was great. She had a good attitude, worked hard, always asked me questions to make sure she was doing things the way I wanted. She was really good to work with. It was easy to communicate with her because she could speak English. I speak Chinese, so that's how I've communicated with Chinese ayis in the past, but it's just easier in English. And my son (who was preschool-age) loved her. (He loves everyone though.)

We paid her more than we would have paid a Chinese ayi. In my experience, Chinese ayis get a salary around 40-50 RMB/hr (this is about 6-7 USD), but we paid Brenda around 60-70 RMB/hr (about 9-10 USD). Actually I have no idea what the normal hourly rate is for Filipino ayis in Shanghai. We just asked her what her previous salary was, and believed whatever she said, and based it on that. I was okay with that because I knew it would just be a short-term thing. If she was going to work for us longer, I would have put more effort into figuring out what a reasonable salary would be. 

But, yeah, I felt it didn't make sense to have her work for us long-term, because what I really needed was someone to take care of the baby, and why would I pay so much extra money when she hasn't even worked with newborn babies before? (And she was also looking for more hours than what I wanted to give her- so it just wasn't going to work out long-term. But we really liked her and I'm glad to have met her and found out something about what life is like for Filipinos working illegally in China.)

There were several instances where I felt like, I'm so privileged and out-of-touch with what her life is like. For example, right when she started working for us, I tried to get a key card for her so she could get into our building. You have to go to the apartment management office with your ID and register in order to get a key card. Brenda was very much NOT willing to do that. I felt like... I'm asking her to do something that might put her at risk. Like I'm so out-of-touch, I don't even understand what I'm asking her to do. Fortunately (???) our apartment complex doesn't actually care about security, and the building door is always left open, so she was able to enter the building even without a key card. 

Also, sometimes she came with me to pick up my son from school. When we were waiting outside the gate with all the other parents, she would kind of nervously side-eye the school security guards. And I felt like she was being paranoid- but what do I know? It's easy for me to say "she's being paranoid" and judge her, when I'm not the one at risk of being deported. It's not right for me to judge what level of "paranoid" she should be.

She told me she has friends who never even take the subway, because there are police there. She took the subway herself though.

She didn't have a bank account in China. I used WeChat to pay her. (WeChat is a Chinese app for texting and social media, and it also has a payment function- you can easily send people money, and stores in China all accept WeChat Pay, so there's no problem using your WeChat wallet to buy stuff.) She couldn't open an actual bank account because banks require international customers to have a valid visa.

And here's another weird thing- one time, we were cleaning out our kitchen and found an old rice cooker, and we were gonna get rid of it, and Brenda asked if she could have it. To mail to somebody in the Philippines. I found it hard to believe that somebody in the Philippines would want our old rice cooker (do they even have the same kind of outlets there? The US has different outlets than China, I have no idea what they have in the Philippines) but she really wanted it, so we gave it to her. Another time we found a box of cables from old electronics, and we were going to throw them away because we didn't even know what they were from, and Brenda wanted those. I think maybe she could get money from recycling them. In the places we've lived in China, there have always been people looking through the trash bins, looking for things they can get money for. Mostly cardboard boxes and plastic bottles. If we hadn't given those old cables to Brenda, I'm sure somebody else would have taken them out of our trash. 

She said that she's heard from other Filipinos that one strategy would be to marry a Chinese man, in order to get legal immigrant status. But, she said, she doesn't really want to. I said, yeah you shouldn't marry someone if you don't want to.

And, yeah, I believe it's a bad idea to marry someone if you don't want to. But I also think it's a bad idea to live in China as an illegal immigrant, but I can't judge because obviously I don't know what her situation was in the Philippines, and why she decided to come to China, and how long she initially planned to stay, and if her life is better in China than it would have been in the Philippines, and if she is earning money for the purpose of supporting family in the Philippines, etc. (Her situation is different from the other anecdotes in this post because she doesn't have kids.) I didn't ask her any of that because it's none of my business. (Also there is a power difference, because I was her boss- she has to act like she cares about my problems, regardless of whether she does or not. So, try not to exploit that.)

There are people in this world who chose to get married for those kinds of reasons, not because of a romantic "I want to spend my life with this person." There are people who are in a situation where that is actually, somehow, a good idea.

From my point of view, it doesn't make sense- she can't even have a bank account, she can't go home and see her family, she can't really travel in China, she always has to be worried about police, she always told me about problems she was having with her landlord, probably it's easy for a landlord to exploit Filipinos who are in China illegally, especially since she couldn't speak very much Chinese, and so on and so on- why would someone choose to live as an illegal immigrant in China? But she knows her own situation, and I don't, so I can't judge. There's a lot of information I just don't have.

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We went on a cruise from Shanghai to Japan. In the ship's main dining room, we were assigned to a certain table, so we had the same waiter every night. Towards the end of the cruise, we were friendly enough with him to chat about what life is really like for him on the cruise ship. He was also from the Philippines. Let's call him Daniel.

We chatted about a LOT of things with him! He said he was happy to talk to us because a lot of the passengers only speak Chinese, which makes it hard for him because he doesn't speak Chinese at all. I started out asking him if the ship only travels between Shanghai and Japan, or if it also goes to other places. And I asked if they have cruises all the time, or if there are some days in between cruises where they don't have any passengers. Turns out, they have cruises ALL the time. Daniel said that after we all leave, the crew has to work hard cleaning all the rooms to get ready for new passengers to arrive that same day. They even bring the waiters in to help with cleaning the rooms.

I asked him if the rooms for the crew were smaller than our rooms (yes).

We had seen the waitstaff all having a meeting in the afternoon, when the dining room was empty, so we asked him what that was about. He got talking about the expectations for their work performance, and how if some customer gives them an 8 out of 10 review, they get called in to the manager's office, like "What did you do???!!!!" (I said, "wait, 8 is bad???") Daniel says, "What can I do, some people just never give anything higher than a 7."

(A week later, when I got the email about filling out the survey, I gave the staff all 10 out of 10. And there was one question on there, "Was there any crew member that told you to give them a good review?" and I put "no" because probably they get in trouble for that. Later there was a question "Was there any crew member that did a really good job?" and I put his name in there, and also the assistant waiter and the woman who cleaned our rooms.)

My husband and I had been wondering about the people who work on the ship- we felt like maybe it would be a good job to have when you're young and want to see the world and you don't have any family commitments. So we asked Daniel about that. He said, his wife also works on the ship. Yeah, it's common for the crew to get married to each other, because you're on a ship in the middle of the ocean, where else are you going to meet anyone?

He said, they have a son. The son is in the Philippines- the grandparents are raising him. And Daniel misses his son a lot, but working on the cruise ship he's able to earn more money than he would in the Philippines, to give his son a good education. And last time he visited home, his son was crying at the airport telling him not to leave... And how he hopes that soon his wife will stop working on the cruise ship and go back home, and hopefully in a few years he will too.

The cruise ship had an activity where you could pay 100 dollars per person to take the "behind-the-scenes tour." No need to do that- you can just talk to the waiter. (I also talked to the Chinese woman who cleaned our room every day.) The people who work on the ship, they know a lot of things. Many of those things they probably aren't supposed to tell you- their job is to give you whatever you ask for, and be extremely polite, and pretend to be happy even if the customers are really annoying and unreasonable, and give you a perfect vacation experience, and make you feel like the world revolves around you...

If you want to ask them things, for your own curiosity, obviously don't do it at a time when they're busy. That's annoying. You should thank them for the work they are doing, show them you appreciate it, be friendly, maybe from there you'll have a chance to ask them about their life, or the practical logistics of the cruise ship, or whatever, if they're willing to talk about it.

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This is a real thing in this world- people who are in a situation where their best option is to live far away from their children. And this will inevitably be true, when some places have much better job opportunities and a higher cost of living, compared to other places. Mathematically, the way to earn the most money and to have that money be used most effectively, is to have the income-earners of the family live in the places with higher salaries, and the children to live in places with a lower cost of living. I feel sad about it, but it's not something that can be easily changed- it's entirely based on the very big economic differences between different places in this world.

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Related:

That's What Radicalized Me (a post about immigration)

"The Case For Open Borders" (book review) 

"The Case for Open Borders": Remittances

On "Unjust Marriage" 

Dog Hotels and Poverty Existing at the Same Time

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. These evangelical men saved sex for marriage – they weren’t well prepared (June 17) "The experience has shaped how the couple are raising their six-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son. 'I want my daughter to have full information about her body – I don’t want her to go through what I did,' said Katy. As for their son, 'I just want him to understand that women are people,' said Nate."

2. This abortion method doesn't involve doctors — and many of them consider it safe (June 22) "Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the hotline has only grown. It now has dozens of volunteers, including clinicians as well as people who provide logistical support. The hotline gets thousands of calls and texts every month."

3. A cancer center in Jordan treats kids from Gaza, but only a few dozen have arrived (June 20) "All of Gaza's hospitals have been either damaged or destroyed in Israeli airstrikes."

4. Do You Want to Build a Snowman - 10 YEARS, SAME ANNA! (2024) OH MY GOODNESS this is amazing.

5. What’s the Right Way to Translate Chinese Dish Names? (June 20) "Semantic translation, on the other hand, conveys meaning rather than form. Traditionally, it prioritizes fluency and naturalness in the target language, even if that means departing from the original wording — rendering the Chinese shizitou as 'meatball,' for example. However, semantic translation can also mean literal translation, even if the result seems foreign or puzzling — such as translating shizitou as 'lion’s head.'"

Hmm. Yeah I would describe shizitou [狮子头] as a meatball, but 丸子 are also meatballs, but they are different. I guess then you have no choice but to translate 狮子头 as a lion head meatball? It's pork, though, okay.

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Protest sign that says "No kings / Yas queens!" Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Relief and a raised fist as Mahmoud Khalil goes free – but release ‘very long overdue’ (June 20, via) I'm glad to hear this. But it's not over- his immigration case is still ongoing.

Mahmoud Khalil emerges from airport security with his wife Noor and newborn, legal team and Rep. AOC.

[image or embed]

— Gwynne Hogan (@gwynnefitz.bsky.social) June 22, 2025 at 1:37 AM

'They wanted to separate me from my family': Mahmoud Khalil speaks after ICE release (June 23) "They absolutely showed me nothing. They had over 100 days to do that, and I dare Trump, [Marco] Rubio, and their administration to substantiate these claims with anything, because they did not refer to anything."

2. One daughter's search for a father detained by ICE (June 21) "Urizar had no idea where her father was being held or how to reach him."

3. The Antisemites In and Around the Trump Administration (June 17) "I mean the kind who proudly performs a Roman salute or two on a national stage, like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, sure, but you already knew about those. There are many, many more."

4. U.S. Supreme Court allows — for now — third-country deportations (June 23) "In a searing dissent, the court's three liberals accused the conservative majority of 'rewarding lawlessness.' Writing for the three, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said 'The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone, anywhere without notice or an opportunity be heard.'"

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