Leah Libresco's Blog, page 4

The Race to the Bottom in Sports Gambling

At Deseret, I’m writing on the particular perversity of legalized sports gambling. States touting possible revenue from taxes aim to profit from the degradation of their citizens.

It’s as though a state instituted a tax on adultery, and then began promoting websites like AshleyMadison and held press conferences with prostitution rings. By advertising invitations to unfaithfulness, the state would be hoping the private sins of their citizens could fill a hole in the public budget. The more money adultery brought into state coffers, the more a state would be caught in a perverse bind of its own making. If marriages got stronger, the state would be poorer.

A state that relies on gambling revenue is similarly reliant on worsening the lives of its citizens. It plans to fix crumbling infrastructure by eroding the financial stability of its families, to fill potholes by laying pits in the path of its people.

Read the whole thing at Deseret.

My Favorite Books of 2022

This year began with a baby, had a move in the middle, and I’m now getting to discover what normal might look like in our new state. These were my favorite books I read over the course of the year, listed in roughly chronological order.

Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

An interesting history of weaving, mothering, and friendship. I wrote about it on Other Feminisms here (“Women’s Work is Communal”).

Mothers have toddlers underfoot, and need a workspace that is relatively safe for marauding children (keeping the children safe from the work and vice versa). Mothers benefit from work that is somewhat interruptible, as a child demands attention or needs to nurse. And mothers have an easier time with shared work, when a group of women can watch children together or trade off baby- vs heddle-wrangling.

It’s given me a way of thinking about how we design work and chores, and I’m grateful for it.

Love’s Labors: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency by Eva Feder Kittay

Everyone told me to read this, and they were right. I drew heavily on Kittay for my Mere Orthodoxy piece “How to Value Caring Work.”

In Kittay’s view, care is never a private matter, something that can be contained in a single dyad or family. Dependency creates a chain of need, which extends out into the wider world. She takes the relationship of mother and child as paradigmatic: “The relation between a needy child and the mother who tends to those needs is analogous to the mother’s own neediness and those who are in a position to meet those needs.” Caring for a child makes the mother more dependent, and gives her a just claim on others, just as the baby has a claim on her.

Kittay terms this framework doulia. She adapts doulia from doula, a person who offers care to a laboring mother. In her broader term, she encompasses “a concept of interdependence that recognizes a relation — not precisely of reciprocity but of nested dependencies — linking those who help and those who require help to give aid to those who cannot help themselves.”

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

One of the books on my list that I read, and my husband half-read, since I read so many passages aloud. It’s non-fiction that is more outrageous than fiction could ever dare. Orlean profiles a man who believed he had found a loophole to let him poach a protected orchid legally. The book is a rollicking tale.

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

There are a couple genres of non-fiction that I love. One is “biographies of things that aren’t people” (e.g. Salt, Empires of the Sky, etc). Another is “how did all this get organized?” (e.g. Inventing Temperature, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, etc.). This is one of those.

The book is about how the Chinese language found ways to interlock with the industrialized and then computerized age. A particular highlight was the character-keyboard that the typist operated by playing chords of keystrokes.

Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U. S. Navy by Ian W. Toll

The book that will let you say to your loved ones, “Do you have fifteen minutes for me to read you this naval battle in full?” I loved it, and while I was reading it, I felt intensely torn—I knew from history class that we had won the War of 1812, but it’s very hard it to believe it ends up that way when you read about the war in detail.

Flying Blind: Boeing’s Max Tragedy and the Lost Soul of an American Icon by Peter Robison

Fascinating, detailed, and infuriating. The well-reported story of how Boeing adopted a GE-inspired focus on quarterly profit and loss… and hollowed out engineering and testing to chase short-term savings. The Boeing Max 8 killed hundreds of passengers, and, every step of the way, there was a Boeing employee or regulator trying to sound alarms.

It’s a cautionary tale both about regulatory capture and stagnation. The Max8 was a bad plane from the get-go, since, instead of being designed de novo, it was an attempt to make a new plane that could pass as an update of an old plane (and thus receive less regulatory scrutiny). They had to keep designing weird kludges to avoid building the plane right if that meant building it differently.

Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation by Erika Krouse

CW: Memoir by a sexual abuse survivor who works as a PI investigating a sexual assault and culture of abuse on a college campus.

Very well written and thoughtful. Krouse asks a lot of the people she interviews since she may need them to testify in a multi-year suit against a school with enough money to make the fight painful. She thinks hard about what kind of win could be worth it.

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers by Mary Rodgers with Jesse Green

Best footnotes of the year. Mary Rodgers narrates her life in a voice that is both tart and wistful. The footnoting she and Jesse Green (theater reviewer for the New York Times) worked out gives her the freedom to tell stories as she remembers them, with some corrections running in counterpoint. A highlight was hearing her recount how the parts in Once Upon a Mattress were all tailored to the needs of it’s initial workshop cast (including a mute king for a tone deaf singer).

And if you’re interested, my list from 2021 is here.

The Cost of Evading Moral Argument

At Deseret, I’m writing about the hamstrung compromises we get when people disagree on moral grounds but fight on practical grounds. I’m writing specifically on the death penalty, but it’s only one, particularly painful example, of how America sometimes makes a controversial policy legal but impossible.

For years, the moral issue of the death penalty has been contested on practical grounds, leaving us with a system worse than a clear victory for either side. While other nations either permit or outlaw executions, America has expressed its mixed feelings by allowing states to attempt executions while hamstringing them on how.

This mess is the result of years of deliberate attempts to chip away at the feasibility of the death penalty. Without a clear path to outlaw executions in Congress or at the Supreme Court, the anti-death penalty movement has focused on making them impossible to carry out. Activists have targeted the suppliers of lethal drugs, putting pressure on companies to stop selling their drugs to states that will use them to kill, and asking European countries that have banned the death penalty to place export restrictions on the drugs. 

They have won a Pyrrhic victory with these tactics. Any veterinarian can put an injured dog to sleep, and several states have authorized doctor-assisted suicide that is intended to provide a predictable, painless death. But for the people we condemn to death, the killings are improvised and slapdash. 

Read the whole thing at Deseret

Reckoning With Reality

I got to write for National Review on why vocational education and home economics should be part of everyone’s education. These tracks are exercises in truth-telling and help make good citizens.

In effect, our goods are leased, not owned. Even if we’ve paid for them outright, they are designed to be beyond us and to require frequent recourse to the experts allowed inside. And, often, when we seek the experts, they tell us that repair is impossible or not cost-effective. The only solution is replacement. These experiences are an education in learned helplessness.

In contrast, a shop class, taught well, is an education in truth-telling. In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew
Crawford explains that he loves motorcycle repair because it cannot be faked. No matter how much you feel that you are owed a working machine at the end of repairs, the motorcycle can’t be argued or bullied into compliance. Crawford writes: “In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian, one submits to things that have their own intractable ways. . . . The tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.”

There’s a clarity to physical work that can be harder to achieve in the broader liberal arts. Repeated encounters with the “infallible judgment of reality” can help train away the squirmy impulse to hope, argue, or assert a falsehood into being true. In other classes, and in many white-collar jobs, the truth can seem secondary. You can succeed without solving the problem in front of you if you can instead tell a story about why the problem isn’t your responsibility. That is its own education and formation of character.

Read the rest at National Review

How Reversible are LARCs?

For a long time, I’ve wondered how easy it is for poor women to get IUDs removed. Long active reversible contraception (LARCs) are strongly recommended for poor women, but they can face the greatest barriers to seeing a doctor, and can be stuck, unable to have the children they want. I was glad to get to research this for the Institute for Family Studies.

The glossy tone of the [contraceptive program] ad camouflages this reality, framing birth control as an expansive way of life, rather than a response to a narrowing of a woman’s options. But behind the PSAs, the advisories for doctors are more candid about how LARCs fit into a culture that disempowers women. 

Part of the case for LARCs, as explained by the Maryland Health Department, is that vulnerable women have only limited access to health care. Pregnancy and the immediate post-partum period might be the only time that vulnerable women can afford to see a doctor, since their pregnancy makes them eligible for Medicaid. The coverage lasts only two months post-partum, so the window for follow-up care is narrow. A woman who expresses a wish for a LARC at her six-week follow up may have only two weeks to receive it before her coverage lapses. Significant proportions of mothers do not make it to their six-week visit at all. 

Thus, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommendation is to take advantage of the moment when “the woman and clinician are in the same place at the same time.” The ideal, according to ACOG, is to place the IUD “within 10 minutes of placental delivery in vaginal and cesarean births.” In some hospitals, that may mean the IUD preventing future births is placed before the present baby has been handed to his or her mother. The ACOG notes that IUD placement immediately post-partum has a higher failure rate (where the IUD is expelled) than placement later after birth. But they estimate that a poorer success rate is better than a purely hypothetical higher success rate. If a later appointment is impossible, then the success rate is nil.

The ACOG covers some possible counterindications and topics for discussion with women considering post-partum IUDs or implants. But they do not suggest doctors ask the question: “Do you have a plan for obtaining care to remove your IUD or implant when you are ready?” 

[…]A woman who relies on an IUD depends on a doctor to be able to have children again. If IUDs are specifically recommended to women who have difficulty accessing medical care, these will also be the women who face the most obstacles to being able to conceive the children they want. 

Read the whole thing at IFS

A Breast Pump Designed for Your Boss

In “Designing Women,” I’m writing at Comment on how the tools intended for women often serve the interests of someone else. I’m very much indebted to Designing Motherhood, which I draw on in the piece.

A doctor’s office and tools are more often designed for the convenience of the doctor, not the patient. A breast pump is another intimate tool that appears to be designed for the needs of a hidden end user—not the mother but her boss. A breast pump attenuates the claim a child makes on its mother. A breast pump does not cry. It does not interrupt. It is (allegedly) hands free. It comes with an off switch. A child demands; a breast pump is available on demand.

It is easier for an employer to point to all these seeming efficiencies and offer the mother less: pump later, pump less often, pump in a dark storage closet or hidden in your car or the toilet. In a survey of mothers working outside the home (sponsored in 2020 by companies that sell breast pumps, lactation pods, and milk-bank services), a quarter of women said that they didn’t have a dedicated space to pump at work.

If the baby were at work, it would be obvious that the child’s hunger cannot be put off forever. Alone with a pump, the mother suffers from unjust demands silently, as her breasts engorge and plugged ducts fester into mastitis. If the baby were visible, it would be obvious you can’t lock a vulnerable person in a closet. But the mother, no less valuable, is more easily mistreated.

Read the whole thing at Comment.

And I hosted a follow-up conversation about the piece at Other Feminisms.

The Invisible Infrastructure of Immigration

After Florida governor Ron DeSantis flew migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, I wrote about how non-profits cover the gaps of our broken immigration system for Deseret.

This is the pattern; the official system is broken, and charitable organizations and activists keep a broken system from being even worse than it is.

It’s organizations and individuals who put out water in the desert, trying to save migrants from death by dehydration. It’s border-based religious charities like HIAS and Catholic Charities that wait at bus stations, help migrants reach their intended destinations and settle in a city where they have family or countrymen. It’s people who work every day on the border who have a Quechua translator on retainer. 

The space between what the government provides and what asylum-seekers need is a gap that can’t be covered simply with good intentions and a willingness to get involved. It requires sustained investment and institutional presence.

Read the rest at Deseret

How Do We Value Care Work?

As the cover story for Mere Orthodoxy’s third issue, I wrote on how we value care work, and the thin line between humility and degradation. A care worker knows that they are not easily replaceable, and they can’t rely on the kinds of labor power that unions use to shut down a factory.

Many workers stay for overtime or take on tasks that go outside the work they are compensated for, because they know their charge intimately and are moved by their need. This can be framed as a kind of emotional blackmail — the worker has their “no” taken away. But Kittay sees an alternative way of thinking about it: the worker wants to be able to say “yes” to their charge’s need, but the “yes” can be too costly for them to be free to offer.

Workers who care directly for the vulnerable have the relief of knowing they aren’t working what David Graeber terms “bullshit jobs.” They can see that their work matters. Without their help, their charge could not use the bathroom, might not eat, would die. But that means they lose the leverage other workers have to strike, engage in work stoppages, or sometimes even to quit.

In Full Surrogacy Now, author Sophie Lewis claims that abortion is the kind of strike available to surrogate mothers. When they face exploitation, Lewis suggests, they can refuse to work, which means severing the connection between themselves and the child who depends on them, delivering a corpse where their employers hoped for a child. Few consider this option, no matter how dire their circumstances. Care workers are close to the people entrusted to them; they learn to see the world through their charge’s eyes in order to understand their needs.

Read the whole thing at Mere Orthodoxy

I hosted a follow up conversation about this piece at Other Feminisms.

Life Costs More Than Death

In the aftermath of Dobbs, I wrote for Deseret on what comes next for the pro-life movement.

The Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization limits the danger to children in the womb, but the justices cannot confer dignity, safety or hope by fiat. That’s the continued work required of the anti-abortion movement, work that offers chances for alliances with advocates for abortion rights. We don’t have to agree about the moral weight of abortion to acknowledge that America has neither a culture of life nor a culture of choice. We live in, as Pope Francis has termed it, a throwaway culture.

The majority of abortions in the United States are sought by women who have previously given birth to a baby. They don’t need to see an ultrasound to make the connection between pregnancy and parenthood. When mothers seeking abortion were interviewed in-depth, many said that they wanted to be able to give birth to the child they were carrying, but they felt it wouldn’t be fair to the children they were already struggling to care for. These women pass the test of the abortion-rights slogan “Every child a wanted child.” But they could tell that their children were unwanted by the rest of us. Death was the only “choice” that we, as a nation, made provision for. 

Read the rest at Deseret

Avoiding Pitting Mothers Against Babies

Both pro-life and pro-choice people all support saving the life of a woman who has an ectopic pregnancy. I wrote about my own experience losing my child, Camillian, in an ectopic pregnancy for the New York Times. My goal was to explain not just what a pro-life perspective permits but what it makes possible to support the dignity of mother and child.

The first person to see us was another ultrasound technician. Her voice got sharp when I asked if our baby had a heartbeat. “It’s not a baby, don’t talk like that,” she told me, as I lay on the table. Her voice softened a little, “You don’t have to think of it that way.” For her, part of providing care was denying there was any room for grief.

But when the surgeon came in, he began by expressing his condolences. He talked about our options, he talked about our baby as a baby. He answered our questions about recovery times from surgery as naturally as he did our questions about how to specify that we wanted our child’s body for burial. He took our request seriously and told us that we should know that as far as he could tell, our baby had already died and it was the placenta that was still growing and putting me in danger. But if he could, he would make sure that our baby wasn’t treated as just a tissue sample but as a child lost.

Read the whole thing

I also wrote a little on Other Feminisms in response to the comments I received.