12.22.23 MomLinks: Cops In Closed Libraries

While NYC slashes its school and library budgets, police find funds to stand around the subway. Plus, shady surgeries, birth control battles, and Moms for Liberty's ongoing meltdown.

Happy holidays, momrades! I’ll be off next week for Christmas, school breaks, and covid-related cancellations. But before I head out, I wanted to round up some of my favorite recent reading on parenthood.

Here are your holiday MomLinks:

-The New York Times has a jaw-dropping new investigation on mouths. Fueled by “profit, greed, and ignorance,” dentists and lactation consultants are pushing parents to seek “tongue-tie” surgery for infants who struggle to nurse. While some parents say the procedure has helped newborns to feed, evidence for the technique’s efficacy remains murky. Some lactation consultants and oral surgeons who sell the procedure have gone further, telling parents that proactively cutting the tissues beneath their babies’ tongues could prevent future health issues like sleep apnea. Those interventions occasionally lead to more severe health risks for babies.

“We went from a child who was breastfeeding voraciously to one who was not able to breastfeed,” one mother told the Times. “It felt like, what the hell did I just do to my child?”

-Internal turmoil continues to rock Moms for Liberty, Wired reports. In addition to recent sex scandal (one of the anti-LGBT group’s founders, Bridget Ziegler, was revealed to have engaged in a three-way relationship with a woman who is accusing Ziegler’s husband of rape), the group is also facing questions about its involvement with the fascist group the Proud Boys, and the revelation that a Philadelphia-based MfL leader is a registered sex offender.

-The group’s assorted scandals and electoral shortcomings have threatened Moms for Liberty’s clout in the GOP, and “prompted questions about the future of education issues as an animating force in Republican politics,” the New York Times reports. But even without the group working on the frontline of the culture war, book-banners are still disrupting schools. In Massachusetts, a plainclothes police officer wearing a body camera entered an eighth-grade classroom to look for a copy of the book Gender Queer, following an anonymous complaint about the book, which has become a bogeyman for the anti-LGBT advocates.

The ACLU of Massachusetts has expressed alarm about the police search. “We’re very troubled by this notion,” Ruth A. Bourquin, the group’s senior and managing attorney told the Berkshire Eagle. “They say anytime someone could call they have an obligation to go marching into places wearing a body cam, and you know, interrogating people.”

-Meanwhile, a right-wing advocacy group is providing pro-bono legal representation to the state of Idaho in anti-abortion and anti-trans legal cases, Chris Geidner of LawDork reports. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal empire, is giving the state free legal services to enforce a near-total abortion ban, as well as the state’s new law preventing transgender students from using school bathrooms that match their gender identity.

-That campaign coincides with a broader GOP effort to attack not just abortion, but birth control. In Rolling Stone, Tessa Stuart reports on “Project 2025,” a blueprint for Republicans’ return to power. The plan, authored by the Heritage Foundation with buy-in from the larger party, includes “proposals to attack contraception access, use the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to increase ‘abortion surveillance’ and data collection, rescind a Department of Defense policy to ‘prohibit abortion travel funding,’ punish states that require health insurance plans to cover abortion, and retool a law that is currently protecting pregnant women with life-threatening conditions,” Stuart writes.

-New York City’s teachers union is suing Democratic Mayor Eric Adams to prevent what the union describes as “draconian” cuts to the school budget. Adams announced last month a budget cut of nearly $550 million for city school—part of larger spending slash that will also force most city libraries to close on Sundays. NYC’s teacher’s union says the cuts violate a law prohibiting contributions to schools when the city’s revenue is on the rise (it increased by $5 billion last year, the union argues). Adams’ administration has still found funds to pay some departments, however; although the new budget does freeze police hiring, NYPD also received lavish overtime payments this year, Gothamist reports. In 2023 overtime pay just for extra police officers in the subway ballooned to $155 million, up from $4 million in 2022.

-Schools in Texas have a different staffing problem. After the state did little to address a major teacher shortage this year, some schools are recruiting educators from abroad, the 19th reports. The Aldine, Texas school district has recruited 76 teachers from more than a dozen countries this year to help address hundreds of teacher shortages. But the international recruitment does not represent a permanent staffing solution, school officials said. Texas is facing a higher-than-average teacher attrition rate, the 19th reports, with educators citing low pay, poor benefits, and censorious new policies that restrict how schools can address race, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues. And international teachers are usually bound by five-year J-1 visas, after which they are encouraged to leave the country again. 

-In the New York Times, Amanda Hess has a close-read of parenting dynamics in popular children’s tv show “Bluey,” and its new, conservative ripoff, “Chip Chilla.”

“The ‘Bluey’ family feels progressive, ‘Chip Chilla’ traditional, but their vision of paternal whimsy is shared,” Hess writes. “It is harder to construct a fantasy mom that way. The perfect mother must be a lot of things, and few of them are very fun. The base line expectation of selfless devotion leaves little room for experimentation.”