do journos believe in immaculate conception?

[lafemmequipensequelleestunchap]

anyone else continue to be staggered at the extent to which gendered language and assumptions about parenting encroach into good journalism? It's just there, as if it belongs there and doesn't merit questioning. The BBC are doing some stuff about declining birth rates in the EU and this is how they start it off:

EU states are trying to understand why the birth rate is falling - and if anything can be done to stem the decline. All this week, the BBC News website is asking women in various countries about how they feel about being asked to have more babies, and how easy or difficult they find combining motherhood and work.

so are these women going about this through immaculate conception?

It goes on - with regard to Italy...

The question is why? The answer is that many single women now work hard to avoid the responsibilities of childcare. An increasing proportion of educated women no longer want to be just mothers and wives.

FFS this is the BB sodding C. Meant to be amongst the highest quality, balanced journalism in the world. but gender balance? naaah that doesn;t really count. well, certainly not when it comes to babies.

\link{http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4768644.stm\grrrr}

But at the end of the day women physically have babies and men don't. If a man wants a baby a woman has to agree to have one too so asking women why they don't want babies seems sensible to me.

perhaps they should have asked couples.....

yes women physically have them, but when are we going to stop obsessing about this. carrying a baby and even breastfeeding is but a tiny fraction of bringing a child up into an adult. And yet we focus on this to the extent of excluding men from the picture.

It may be only a small part of the childs upbringing but IMO an extremely important part too. Unfortuantely men need to be made to be more responsible for babies, childcare etc etc and that starts with us as the mothers of sons.

As a BBC journalist I have to point out that falling birthrates have coincided with women's ability to control the number of children they produce. So actually women's behaviour is more important than mens on this issue.

Also, journalists can't win. If men were asked why they don't feel able to have more kids rather than women, I'm sure that would lead to different accusations of sexism.

It's all a bit silly, and more to do with the arty racists at the EU than anything else. Fact is that we're going to hit a demographic wall hard, and the options are either a much older poopulation or import young people. It's simply too late for any plausible increase in fertility to make a useful difference.
Thus my criticism of the BBc article is that the person who covered it didn't challenge the obvious mathematical flaw in ny such attempt.

Perhpas someone should send her a spreadsheet to run on her Macintosh ?

Snap Spidermama - we should have an off-line conversation.....gulp...we might know each other in RL....

no .. don't get why you think its weird to ask women

As I understand it, DC - and I realise that my English degree clearly invalidates any claims I might make in that regard - Clare Murphy is looking not at the population issue itself but at how women feel about government exhortations.

I think, ma chapeau (ma chappelle?) that it is valid to ask women how they feel about being treated, effectively, as potential brood mares, actually. But obviously I see your wider point.

i'm not saying that any degree invalidates your feelings. I'm cynical about a journalist who reports on something without the ability or integrity to work out the basics of that issue.
You can't understand demographics in isolation from the numbers.

You can grasp the demographics with an English degree, but the difference is that BBC journos don't really like doing the hard bits of issues where they involve things other than "human interest".
We see this pattern in much from the BBC, where howlers in scientific issues on the order of saying that JK Rowling wrote The Lord of the Rings are seen as uninteresting pedantic details.

Recall the "concern" over MMR. How many kids have lost their sight over that ?

Eh? I said she's looking at how women are reacting to be asked to have more babies. Which is a different story, and is, I would argue, not just 'human interest': it's political.

OMG, you mean JK Rowling didn't write Lord of the Rings?

Ah, if you have an English degree, you see, Callisto, you'd know who wrote things.

It was CS Lewis, didn't you know?

mmm. OK I can see some of your points. and of course it's always valid to consult women. but I still lament (very much) the fact that an issue that is basically about having babies is being covered in a way that appears to leave men out of the equation.

There is a division between childbearing (women-only despite all those 'we're pregnant' men) and childrearing (should be shared despite all those other - or are they the same? men), which I fully accept has not been taken on board here, no.

In general it's a good thing that the relative power of women in decisions over kids has grown.

But that's not without a price.
As a bloke the chances of me getting custody in a divorce are slight, and access to the kids can be denied by the woman at whim.

The Child Support Agency has not made the option of being a father more attractive either.

Women have flexible and effective contraception options that they can use or not use. Without a man's consent, and it is nont unknown for them not to tell the truth about whether they are using them.

A bloke gets no say in things like abortion. I'm not quite sure what role he should have, but again men's influence has declined dramatically.

The welfare state allows women to bring up kids without their father.

With all these things, I see them as good, mostly, at least in intent.
There are of course many issues in being a mother, but people of either sex make decisions it's easier for them to grasp the factors that have a personal impact.

Welshmum I'm wonder who you might be now. Maybe we have worked together. (gulp!)

I'll be brave and CAT you.....