nyt on pregnancy and kids

Two NYT stories I thought were pretty interesting. This one says a lot of women in elite colleges nowadays just want to raise kids:

Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Apparently the reporter emailed two dorms at Yale and found that 60% of they planned to cut back on work or stop work entirely once they have kids.

Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, told the paper, “Staying at home with your children isn’t as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30’s now.”

Yale sophomore Angie Ku told the Times she didn’t it’s a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids. “I accept things how they are,” she said. “I don’t mind the status quo. I don’t see why I have to go against it.”

No point to this, I just thought it was interesting.

The same thing with this story, which I meant to blog about at the time, but I read it on the plane to Colorado. I think my father was the first at the hospital where I was born to be there, but reading it makes me want to wait in the waiting room (if in fact I ever have kids)…

Although no one seems to talk publicly about the problem, Josh is only one of dozens of men who have confided to me that witnessing the births of their children has made it difficult for them to be attracted to their wives, at least in the short run.

They seem to have trouble seeing them as sexual beings after seeing them make babies, trouble reverting to a mind-set in which their wives’ sexual anatomy is just that — not associated with images of new life emerging through the birth canal.

In the age of the “new man,” very little consideration is given to the potentially negative side effects of togetherness in the delivery room. …

The trouble is that the moment turns out to be both intensely beautiful and potentially traumatic. … And not every man gets over it. Several men have confessed to me that they never regained the same romantic view of their wives that they had before seeing them deliver children.

This article actually came up Saturday night over sandwiches at Katz’s … there’s mostly outraged reaction from the blogosphere here, here, and this comment section. Slate comes to these guys’ defense here, however, and Ann Althouse has some thoughtful comments here.