Word: childbirth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pregnancy more visibly progresses, the question I'm asked most frequently by relatives and total strangers is not whether I'm having a girl or a boy, but whether I'm having a C-section. Vaginal childbirth is very out these days in Tehran. The procedure is quickly edging out the nose job as the dominant medical trend among Iranians, a people very fond of surgery. No longer the provenance of last-minute complications or doctors' liability fears, Caesarean delivery is viewed here as the modern woman's choice. An Iranian politician I interviewed recently even worked the normalcy...
...Islamic dress, women focused on beautifying what remained visible: their faces. That turned Iran into the nose job capital of the world, and shaped a generation receptive to elective surgery, in particular procedures that broke with tradition: be it the classically hooked Iranian nose, or the female ritual of childbirth. Once having one's nose carved became as routine as a dental cleaning, Iranians simply grew to feel at home with non-medical surgery...
...then letting someone else care for the child. This way, the parent is not tied to an unsustainable burden, and the child is given a suitable developmental environment. Though this may seem like an ideal solution, it ignores several key issues, chief among them the fact that pregnancy and childbirth themselves require significant resources—for example, to pay for hospital fees and compensate for lost wages. Not all maternity leaves are paid, and not everyone can afford an extended unpaid leave. Furthermore, certain types of work (construction, say) are not very physically accommodating towards pregnancy. More importantly, perhaps...
...pattern is established in childbirth and breastfeeding that can be hard to break, observes Greg Allen, author of the blog Daddytypes. The mother becomes the expert first, then cringes as she watches her husband awkwardly stumble through his learning curve. As she hears the cries of her fragile infant, she can't help but interrupt...
...protection could come at a moral cost: the technical term is "disinhibition, which the CDC defines as "an increase in unsafe behaviors in response to perceptions of safety caused by introduction of a preventive or therapeutic intervention." (Once upon a time the concern was raised about introducing anesthesia during childbirth, or using penicillin to treat syphilis, as spurring more sexual activity; more recently, the argument is made about needle exchange and condom distribution...