Robin Marantz Henig's Blog, page 7
August 26, 2013
When Is Dying Preferable to Living?
Who can say precisely when suffering becomes unbearable? Each of us no doubt has an individual breaking point. It came later for Brooke Hopkins than it did for others, but five years after his paralyzing accident, it came.
August 23, 2013
When Bioethics Hits Home
Peggy Battin, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, was a long-time advocate of the right to choose the timing and manner of one's death. Her husband Brooke Hopkins, an English professor, looked a bit like a right-to-die case study, paralyzed from the shoulders down after a bicycle collision in 2008, shortly after he retired. But Brooke didn't want to die.
August 13, 2013
Who Will Keep Our Memories When We Forget?
An essay that just ran in the New York Times "Booming" blog, aimed at Baby Boomers like me, nailed one of the qualities that's so different between my generation and the one that came before us: the way we parent. In the fifties and sixties, according to the essayist Beth Thompson, children paid attention to their parents' lives.
July 26, 2013
How Old Are You Really?
People love those self-tests that help them calculate their biological (as opposed to chronological) age, especially if they feel younger and healthier than their peers -- how cool, they think, if a measurement would give them objective proof of just how youthy they REALLY are. A recent report in The New York Times suggests such a measurement may soon be possible.
July 20, 2013
Posthumous Fatherhood
Of all the various modern ways of making babies via assisted reproductive technology, one of the weirdest and most ethically challenging is the practice of inseminating a woman with sperm taken from a man who's already dead. A close second is taking sperm from a man who's not dead yet, but dying, who wants to leave a mark on the world via a baby he will never meet.
July 9, 2013
More Talk About Baby-Making
The endless debate about when is the best age to have children is going on now on the New York Times's Room for Debate blog, provoked this time by an article in The Atlantic by psychologist Jean Twenge, who says the conventional wisdom about a serious drop in fertility after age 35 is just plain wrong.
June 18, 2013
New Ammo in the Mommy Wars
Back in the 1980s when I was having my babies (I've had two, both girls, born in 1980 and 1984), the Mommy Wars was in full flower. It was pre-blogging days—hell, it was basically pre-internet days, except for the lucky few of us who had access to academic email accounts—so most of the rancor took place in newspaper columns and around kitchen tables.
May 18, 2013
Marry Young? That's What This Young Bride Suggests
Like Julia Shaw, the twentysomething author of a Slate article published in April, I married young -- a lot younger than my peers. I was 19 years old and a new college graduate when I married Jeff, my college boyfriend, who was one month shy of 22. It seems so young today. In truth, it seemed young even then. And now we're about to celebrate our 40th anniversary.
May 16, 2013
A Mother-Daughter Story Stitched Into a Quilt
I made the bed the other day in my younger daughter Samantha’s old room with a quilt I pieced together by hand. The quilt wasn’t supposed to be here in my apartment, dressing up Sam’s girlhood bed. It was supposed to be with Sam, in her grownup home. But things took a different turn than I’d anticipated.
May 15, 2013
Work-Life Balance and the "Good-Enough" Life
Elsa Walsh was 12 years older than I was when she had her baby, and a lot further along in her journalism career—a staff writer for The New Yorker—than I ever was going to be. But she's like me in one way: her thoughts about all the hoopla that surrounds the current round of books and articles about whether women can or can't have it all.
