Gruenfeld explains this new wave as one in which women can finally “own their own power by just being women, where you don’t have to see that as totally incompatible. You can be feminine and be a totally powerful person.”  And part of that power comes from figuring out how to manage one’s professional and personal life.

Sandberg has been able to that–she manages her professional life with the raising of two children, and believes that “sharing leadership starts in the home,” with the splitting of domestic side of family life.  She has a 50-50 partnership with her husband, Dave Goldberg, CEO of Survey Monkey, and that this is key to seeing more gender equality in the workplace. Sandberg thinks it “starts with parity in the division of labor at home, “because wives who shoulder more of the burden of child care and housework than their husbands are more likely to lower their professional ambitions or drop out of the workforce altogether.”

Now parity of division of labor leading to more women in powerful business positions would mark some real change.  I like how she advises women to “choose their life partners wisely, to make sure they will be supportive of their professional careers.”

However, when Sandberg talks about how a woman should manage her career, she as a symbol of change comes up short — for me anyway. She advises women to keep striving for jobs they will love “especially before they have children.”   She also says to “keep your foot the gas pedal until the very day you need to leave to “take a break for a child.”

This kind of advice reflects the pronatalist assumption that women will at some point have a child. What would be a sign of real new wave symbol is if she gave the above advice, sure, but also and first the advice to think about whether you want to have children at all, and if you don’t want them, that’s a completely legitimate choice.

It will be sign of real change when women in powerful positions like Sandberg speak from the clear mentality that motherhood is optional, and does not have to be part of “having it all.” “All” can mean many things, not just balancing work inside and outside the home.

A woman quoted in the article says, “Thankfully, there are women like Sheryl who show I can do this while still having a very fulfilling personal life.” It will be a real sign of change when female leaders like Sandberg promote the reality that a “very fulfilling personal life” can include motherhood, but does not necessarily have to.

What powerful women do you know of who have clearly spoken to this reality? I don’t mean that they have said they are not  having children, but that they hold this belief?

Get this.  As the article says,  the  birth business is “worth more than $30 billion a year”–and “limousine labor,” that includes things such as total room redecoration, birth teams with massage therapists, chefs and more are not just for the Beyonce celebrity births. The 1% likes the first class treatment too, says  Ellie Miller, a co-founder of Ellie & Melissa Baby Planners.

Many hospitals have “VIP” wings with “hotel -like accommodations.” And according to the American Academy of Private Physicians, the number of “concierge doctors,” those who don’t take insurance and charge membership fees, has increased 46% in the last 18 months.

Not only does all the baby bump media make getting pregnant cool, the luxury birth business ups the ante to the rich and famous way to give birth to your baby. Better save your money though. Hospitals across the country who offer “luxe maternity”  have everything from hard wood  floors, a 24/7 personal aide, and other kinds of posh hotel amenities, and can charge around $4000 a day, which is more than most standard hospitals charge for the whole kit and kaboodle of delivering a baby thing, Time says.

Pronatalism glorifies pregnancy and the raising of children; this kind of thing adds to the glorification by pushing red carpet delivery.  And the bigger this business gets, the cooler luxury delivery will be, no matter if you can afford it or not.

This kind of thing makes hospitals profit centers. Well, I guess they largely already are, the way our health care system in the States is designed. But this takes it to a new level–the fusion of high end hotel with delivery room, and all the products and services related to each of them. And the more profit we see, the more powerful all that is pro-baby continues to be.

What have you seen out there regarding the high end birth business?

• 4 million babies will be born in the U.S. in 2012
• China will add 16 million babies to their population this year
• A baby girl born in the U.S. today can expect to live to the age of 81.3–until 2093!
• A baby girl in the U.S. will grow up (on average) to have two babies of her own (2.09 to be precise)
• A Nigerian girl born this year will give birth to an average of 4.82 children
• A U.S. baby girl born in 2012 will have a 23% chance her marriage will end in divorce
• A U.S. baby girl born in  2012 will have a 41% chance that she will not marry
• There is a good chance this girl will be named Sophie!

Starting from the bottom up, details and reactions:

• Laura Wattenberg,author of The Baby Name Wizard, projects that this will be the most popular baby girl name this year.
• On marriage, that’s higher than I thought. Not too long ago Time did an article on marriage, and while many aren’t marrying these days, as I recall they reported most did.
• Divorce: that seems a better stat that the common percentage thrown around for some time now -50% or one out of two.
• Work to be done in Nigeria: Clearly better access to birth control!
• About 2 babies per woman: Continued increases in population mean more women, and more women giving birth even at this low rate compared to most countries still means population explosion!
• More people living longer will “continue to make a major contribution to world population expansion over the next half century, regardless of whatever progress might be made reducing fertility says Dave Foreman, author of Man Swarm.
• China–16 million-and that is still with a one child policy–wow.
• Foreman would say 4 million more babies this year is too many: At 310 million right now, unless we don’t do something right now, the U.S. population will “double in the next hundred years to above 600 million to even more than 800 million!”

Numbers like that make me pause.  Ok, I will no longer be here, but is this the direction I want the world to be going when I do leave it? I think not.

Time did a nice visual to lay out these numbers and more (like Brazil–a Brazilian girl born in 2012 has 25% chance of marrying before age 18; in the U.S. it is now the age of 30 if she has a college education), but even so, like I have felt since traveling to Brazil and Argentina, when it comes to population, I am left feeling, well, disturbed, and motivated to action.

Place to start: Check out the Rewilding Website Population Page, Optimum Population Trust, and get your socks knocked off with Foreman’s Man Swarm.

Who else is concerned about how we are going to pull off stabilizing the world’s population?

On one hand, I realize their religious faith drives why they keep having babies.  They adhere to Quiverfull principles of family planning, which essentially is no “planning” per se–no birth control, not even NFP, or natural family planning, because as Nancy Campbell, a Quiverfull leader says, “even natural family planning may be a selfish attempt to thwart the sovereignty of God.”  When they use birth control and “refuse to have children,” “no woman can legitimately claim to love the Lord with all her heart, soul, mind and strength, if she withholds her womb from His service.”

Now to me, this kind of thinking sounds just plain crazy. However, I respect everyone’s right to religious freedom so on one level I respect their beliefs even though are far from my own.

Where I begin to have the problem is when those beliefs impact others and our world.  Let’s start with the carbon footprint of every one of their children. According to Datablog at Guardian.uk, each person in the U.S. has an 18 tonne carbon emissions rate. A tonne is a metric ton, and equivalent to about 2200 pounds. So in standard tons we use in the U.S. that is almost 40,000 pounds of carbon emissions per person. So with 20 kids, that’s almost 800,000 pounds of carbon footprint.

When it comes to the impact of their reproductive actions, how can a religion promote such a level of irresponsible parenthood?  The Catholics seem to get it—take how Pope Paul VI defines responsible parenthood in his 1968 encyclical Humane Vitae:

“In a word, the exercise of responsible parenthood requires that husband and wife, keeping a right order of priorities, recognize their own duties toward God, themselves, their families and human society.” Ok maybe that just means it is alright to use NFP, although we all know many Catholics use other (more effective) means of birth control.

Beyond saying it is “God’s will,” the Duggars are an appalling example of making babies a business and media enterprise. How can they afford all those kids? They say on The Today Show segment it’s that they stay out of debt. But where does their income come from, the source of their livelihood? Reproduction.

The media empire they have created is fueled by how many children they can possibly have. They have to have a baby factory to stay famous, to keep their reality show, to afford to pay for all of those children–Ironically to continue to afford their kids they have to have more of them!

It may be their religion with serious blind spots in today’s world, but it also seems being a baby factory celebrity enterprise is their other needed “creed.”

On Salon.com Mary Elizabeth Williams argues in her article “Stop Judging the Duggars,” that “A family of 20 is just another side of reproductive choice.” I say it is so much more than that. It is a sad and disturbing religious and capitalist “baby as commodity” commentary that indeed deserves to be judged.

What are your reactions to the Duggars at 20?

1st version on technorati

While there I saw in the Wall Street Journal some stats on what people think about us reaching the 7 billion person mark. Check it out:

In its sentiment tracker section, it had a “computational analysis of the conversation on social networks” about hitting 7 billion. Based on the analysis of 1,700 posts on twitter and facebook between October 31 and November 4, it listed 4 response categories: Worry, Optimism, Jokes, and Astonishment.

In what section were the most responses?  Pleased to say the “Worry” category. And one of the highlighted comment areas gave me optimistic pause, “It’s time to stop having kids.”

When it comes to trying to ensure a population that can live with the earth’s finite resources, do we need to curb consumption? Yes.  Work to have better access to birth control and family planning globally? Yes.  Some experts seem to think if we do either of these things, it will solve the problem. To date, I land with World Population Balance–To become sustainable with Earth’s resources, these things are important, but ”large declines in human numbers” will also be necessary.

I also saw a not so unrelated article to what was in the WSJ. In the November 4 edition of USA Today, Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today had a short column titled, “Adoption Month is time to think of kids.”   In a time when we need to reduce the number of births, doing more to promote adoption is a great thing.  Neuharth touts his positive experience with adoption, but still paints it as an option if you can’t have your own biological child.

In Adoption Month I sure would like to see more in the media promoting adoption, not as the last option but as the first option when you are a wanna be parent.  I hear there are problems with the adoption process, but also read that these problems are often myths. I am no expert in this area, but it seems that if there are problems with the adoption process, now is the time to get about fixing them, not just for the kids’, adoptive parents’ sake, but the world’s sake.

In what category would you have put yourself in the Sentiment Tracker analysis-Worry, Optimism, Joke, or Astonishment? What would your comment have been, if yours was one of the 1,700?

What are your thoughts on how to change mindsets on adoption?