Women's Views on News |
| The Sun’s questionable behaviour goes on Posted: 30 Jun 2014 05:02 AM PDT
The Sun continues to offer the latest and most popular children’s toys and characters next to soft porn, despite research that clearly demonstrates that the images are harmful to young girls. The bombardment of sexual imagery next to children’s characters, campaigners at Child Eyes point out, ‘is teaching, or if you like, training girls to see themselves as a sexual object and placing the same culture within boys’ minds’. If that is not bad enough, on the very same page The Sun screams loudly their favourite #shocksells word ‘Paedo’ and rather than describing the crime as 'child abuse' they yet again refer to it as 'sex'. Please spare a few minutes to write to your MP about this situation. You can find your MP and their contact details here. You can also write to your local retailer and insist that this material must be on the top shelf. For Sainsburys click here; Tesco here; Asda here; Morrisons here; Spar here; Nisa here; McColls – from whom the Frozen sticker book is redeemable – here; and the Co-op who they do in many stores now but it is worth checking – here.  |
| New upsides to being an older mum Posted: 30 Jun 2014 01:09 AM PDT
And that older mums might actually live longer. Older mums have long been berated, by media, medical practitioners and general busy-bodies, for leaving it ‘late’ to have children. Labelled ‘selfish’ for perhaps pursuing a career before a family, modern women of a more ‘mature’ age who have become mothers have been blamed for everything from increasing their child’s risk of chromosome abnormalities to burdening their offspring with ageing parents. But new research suggests that there may be benefits to having children later in life. And that more and more women are getting pregnant in their 40s. According to parenting website Netmums, women in their 40s are finding it easier to get pregnant than fertility experts would have us believe. The general consensus is that after 35, a woman’s fertility begins to decline. After 40 it allegedly falls off a cliff. But the Netmums Getting Pregnant Report revealed that almost a quarter of women (23.6 per cent) trying for a child in their 40s fell pregnant in the first month. A further 19 per cent conceived after three months and by six months over half (53.9 per cent) were carrying a child. In addition, 40-plus mums have more than double the number of unexpected pregnancies than women in their teens and twenties. It seems that the general belief that it is harder to get pregnant in your 40s may have led older women to become more complacent about birth control. Another study has suggested that women who are able to conceive naturally and give birth to children later in life are more likely to live longer. That study, by Boston University Medical Center, found that women who gave birth to their last child after the age of 33 were twice as likely to live to at least 95, compared with women who had their last child at the age of 29. “The natural ability to have a child at an older age likely indicates that a woman’s reproductive system is ageing slowly, and therefore so is the rest of her body,” said Dr Thomas Perls of Boston University. Having more than three children however might work against any genetic advantages, said the researchers. Women having children later in life is not a new phenomenon; before the introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s, followed by the Abortion Act, women would keep having children until they were no longer able to. In 1947, there were 34,696 babies born to women over 40, compared to 29,994 in 2012. What has changed, thanks to improved birth control, is women’s ability to choose when to start a family and when to stop. This meant that births to women over 40 plummeted in the decades following the 1960s, with just under 6,000 births in 1977, but since the late 80s numbers have been heading upwards. In the last 20 years the number of births to women over 40 has increased by around 360 per cent, which is significantly greater than population growth, at around 13 per cent. This shift, despite a reported increase in the number of ‘surprise’ pregnancies to older women, is predominantly due to choice. Of course there are many factors that are influencing these choices, including an increasingly educated female population, the desire to establish a career, the financial pressures of starting a family and advances in medicine which mean people are living longer, but the ability to choose when to start a family is and should be seen as progress. But as a society, we continue to point the finger at women who have made that choice, accusing them of ‘missing out’ or ‘leaving it late’. For whatever reason women choose to have children later in life, we should be celebrating the fact that they are able to make that choice. And perhaps cut them some slack – everyone has their own, very personal, reasons for choosing to start a family, or for choosing not to.  |
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