Let’s look at this from a slightly different perspective. Do you think that a mother should be allowed to breastfeed her baby in public? After all, women don’t *have to* breastfeed in public - there are alternatives. Similarly, a woman doesn’t *have to* bring her child to a public venu - she has other options, right?…

1: Her friend asked her to be on the panel when she was in her third trimester, and then again after she had the baby, I’m sure she knew the author would be bringing her baby.

Right. Because children are an abomination, whereas refusing to mute your phone is the hallmark of the sophisticated.

The erasure of mothers, and in particular poorer mothers, is such an issue. It’s one of the ways the feminist movement makes it abundantly clear that the needs of upper-class white women are paramount, while everyone else needs to take a backseat.

It’s against feminism to pretend that you have to hide your children away because a woman’s conference must be divorced from kids and not present at all. Children make noise, but if your reaction to a baby being visible is “Get it out of here. This women’s conference about women’s lives is NOT about babies” is part of…

I agree. Nobody is less charmed by children than me, but I am even less charmed (negative charmed!) by those people who pretend it’s a reasonable worldview to insist that children should be kept in their homes and away from polite society until they’re 17 and 4 months.

Oh for fuck’s sake. The attitude that you can’t go to someplace without your kid because it’s “professional” and that you need to have a babysitter or child-keeper at all times is anti-feminist to the core and supports notions that the only people who “deserve” to reproduce are the affluent.