Republicans are doing everything in their power to make sure more babies are born, but, frankly, no one seems to want them around.

For the last eighteen months, Republican legislators have been proposing dozens of laws to restrict access to abortion and birth control and defund Planned Parenthood with the aim to stamp out abortion so more babies will be born. Yet, once they’re here, our country doesn’t have many programs in place to support families and there is a wave of public sentiment that wants children to not be seen or heard.

U.S. Maternity Policies Are Ridiculously Inadequate

America calls itself family friendly, yet in our current climate, that hardly seems true. A 2011 report by the Human Rights Watch, Failing its Families, shows that 178 countries guarantee national paid maternity leave for mothers and 50 countries have it for fathers, and the U.S. is not among them. The U.S. does have a national policy in place for unpaid leave for up to 12 weeks, but it only applies to companies with more than 50 employees, and with the increase in small business growth and freelance work, it helps fewer and fewer workers. Janet Walsh, deputy director of the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch told David Crary of Huffington Post:

“Despite its enthusiasm about ‘family values,’ the U.S. is decades behind other countries in ensuring the well-being of working families. Being an outlier is nothing to be proud of in a case like this.”

The report found that other countries’ maternity leaves were much more generous, even though they were paid. Malta gives 14 weeks, while Sweden gives mothers 16 months and allocates at least two months exclusively for fathers. In the U.S., only California and New Jersey have paid leave programs (Washington state does as well, but it was never implemented because there is no funding), and although both states have severe budget problems, the leave programs are thriving. They are financed wholly by small payroll tax contributions by workers and offer six weeks of paid leave for parents to bond with a new child or workers to care for a seriously ill child, spouse or parent.

On the other hand, the report, compiled after interviews with dozens of parents, stated that lack of paid leave has many harmful consequences, including exacerbating postpartum depression, early breastfeeding cessation, and causing some families to incur debt or go on welfare.

A 2012 report, the 13th annual State of the World’s Mothers report by the Save the Children foundation, agrees with the Human Rights Watch in its assessment of U.S. maternity policies, ranking our nation near the bottom of developed countries and last in breastfeeding support. This report also found that mothers in the U.S. faced the highest risk of maternal death of any industrialized nation at one-in- 2,100. The U.S. mortality rate for children under 5 is eight per 1,000 births, comparable to Bosnia and Herzegovina. An American child is four times more likely to die before age five than a child in Iceland. The U.S. ranked below 40 other countries on that score. In addition, USA Today reported that U.S. birthrates have fallen along with the economy, to a 25-year low (from 2.12 in 2007 to an expected 1.87 this year), and is not expected to recover for at least a couple of years.

No Children Allowed

There has also been an enormous backlash against parents and their children in public places, with businesses quick to show them the door and the general public disdainful of their presence. #youngchildrenshouldbebannedfrom was even trending on Twitter.

Restaurants, movie theaters and airplanes seem to be the main venues of discontent. JetBlue ejected a family from a flight home from vacation when the pilot decided that their two-year-old’s crying was too disruptive, and airlines claim that passengers have asked for adults-only designated flights and “family areas” of the plane, citing crying and ill-behaved children as their number one complaint.

Restaurants in Atlanta, Pennsylvania and North Carolina have enacted various limits and bans on small children. The Olde Salty restaurant in Carolina Beach and Grant Central Pizza in Atlanta have both posted signs warning parents to take their crying children outside. Olde Salty’s sign shouts, “Screaming children will NOT be tolerated!” and the restaurant told its local NBC affiliate that not only has it not hurt business, patronage has increased. McDain’s Restaurant, in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, recently banned children altogether.

These policies by the restaurants have generated a lot of attention with the majority of the comments negatively against children and what people consider to be their rude, clueless, and entitled parents. In hundreds, even thousands of comments (the airline story has over 10,000), the majority of them were anti-children by not only baby boomer and childless adults, but other parents as well, who claim that they aren’t part of the problem since their children are always perfectly well-behaved, but it must be those OTHER bad parents with the out-of-control children who are the problem. Many expressed vitriolic comments about the children themselves and were roundly applauded.

The recent shooting in Aurora, Colorado at the Batman premiere even turned into a criticism of parenting once it was reported that some small children were injured and one was killed. The judgments were fairly evenly split between those who thought it was poor parenting to a) bring a small child to the midnight showing of anything, much less a violent PG-13 action film, and b) those who didn’t care what time or content was playing, but just thought they shouldn’t have brought the kids at all because it was disruptive to other viewers.

The outcry has swelled such that the few let’s-all-learn-to-get-along comments like this one that appeared were shouted down.

So America, with its politicians who preach about family values, is inhospitable to children financially, professionally and socially, and doesn’t really like kids much at all, unless they stay home with their too-big strollers, sticky fingers, germs and tantrums.

image: telmah.hamlet, Mari Rose Moretti 

The post America Make Up Your Mind: Do You Want Kids or Not? appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnWhy is it that America is only known for hamburgers and hot dogs when we have a burgeoning foodie culture?

A surprising discovery when I lived in France was L’Americain. In the land of gourmet cheeses and perfected baguettes, food is more than something that you just consume for nourishment; it’s art. Which is why I was a little shell-shocked the first time I came across L’Americain, a late night favorite, post-pop music dance party, made up of a baguette stuffed with hamburger meat, french fries and ketchup.

If the French vision of American food had been unclear before, after this particular sandwich run in, it was very clear. For the French, there was no point in glorifying this version of junk street food, when they could just call it what they thought it represented: America.

As a nation, we have often been at the bottom of the list of culinary tradition. Sure, at home we’ve created a foodie culture and mastered combining dishes from around the world, but abroad, there remains a view that we’re all about pizza, hot dogs and chips. Our global foodie reputation is defined more by sugar and fat than by local ingredients with a cosmopolitan twist.

In fact, enter any “American” food store in another country and you’ll get a handful of classic ingredients. I’ve seen everything from swirled jars of peanut butter and jelly to marshmallow cream (things my American counterparts would never dream of buying at home), and much less abroad. But the international crowd loves this stuff. One of my best Swedish friends has specifically requested that next time I come visit she wants Reese’s Miniatures and several bags of Sour Patch Kids.

What is it that has made the rest of the world crave some of our most terrible exports and glaze over our more respectable creations? You don’t see Alice Waters shrines or bookshelves stocked with Mark Bittman translations abroad, but you’ll most certainly come across a sampling of the following.

Hamburgers

McDonald’s has swept the world like a virus, but it’s not just Big Macs that have made their way around the world. Grab an “American” menu in Southeast Asia and you’re sure to find some version of a meat patty wrapped in a bun. For some reason this American classic has other people hooked, albeit poor spellings on menus and misconceptions of what a bun should look like.

Pringles

It’s not just chips in general, but there’s something about “once you pop you can’t stop,” that has seduced the international consumer. Turns out they’re marketed in at least a hundred countries and bring in $1 billion in sales. Sure, in other countries the packaging is often smaller,  because other places know better than to serve up ten servings in one container that we’re sure to down in a single sitting — but those brightly colored canisters with the goofy, mustached man are all over the place.

Mediocre – yet complicated – coffee drinks

Leave it to the global coffee chain Starbucks to make it perfectly acceptable to order a caramel machiatto in countries where coffee consumption is holy. The result is, well, abhorrent. Thanks to the chain it’s trendy to cruise the streets of Paris with a disposable cup and you can now buy Frappacinos in Guatemala. The company’s new instant product alone was responsible for $100 million in global sales last year.

Peanut Butter

It seems like such a staple product and yet for many it’s a luxury. Some love it and some hate it, but peanut butter to Europeans is just as exotic as caviar and foie gras are to many Americans. Try tracking it down outside of the U.S. and you’ll have a difficult time, and yet somehow, everyone knows about it. A former, very typical French roommate of mine (he wouldn’t dream of keeping his smelly cheeses in the refrigerator), thought there was nothing better on his weekend brioche than some good old Jiffy, imported by friends of course.

But forget our foodie reputation for a second.

Although it would be great to be known for all the fantastic, organic and healthy items that many American chefs whip up on a daily basis, wanting to be respected for our food culture is almost a little vain. What we should be more concerned with is how we’re physically impacting the rest of the world.

With obesity rates skyrocketing around the world, and often attributed to imported food, maybe it’s time we took a step back and asked ourselves what we want our global food influence to be.

Hot dogs and high fructose corn syrup? Changing what’s on our plates at home has a larger influence than we may think.

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, taking a conscious look at what’s bubbling in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Images: USDA China, permanently scatterbrained, Brett L., Like_the_Grand_Canyon, Alaivani, egarc2

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