Postpartum Depression is a "Gift"
  July 24, 2025 Howdy, Meteor readers, I spent half my day in the waiting room of an auto shop watching reruns of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The things Olivia Benson has been through are insane; no wonder this show is such effective copaganda.  In today’s newsletter, we’ve got babies on the brain. Nona Willis Aronowitz, whose own baby is due any day now, explains the latest MAHA tomfoolery on postpartum depression and then asks three very important questions about baby sleep. Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONMAHA targets mamas: Earlier this week, an FDA panel discussing the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) during pregnancy made waves in the medical community–and not the good kind. It was so chock-full of misinformation and “MAHA talking points” that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) felt compelled to put out a statement calling the panel “alarmingly unbalanced” and accusing it of ignoring “the harms of untreated perinatal [before, during, and after birth] mood disorders in pregnancy.” A quick review of the accepted scientific facts here: Postpartum depression affects one in eight women; mental health conditions, including suicides and overdoses, are a leading cause of death in pregnant women; and maternal mental health has taken a nosedive in the last few years. Meanwhile, there’s medical consensus that the small risks of taking SSRIs during pregnancy are far outweighed by the serious risks of untreated depression. Yet the vast majority of panel participants repeated widely debunked lies about the dangers of taking SSRIs while pregnant, claiming that the medications pose an increased risk of autism (they don’t), as well as preterm birth, pre-eclampsia, and postpartum hemorrhage (the effects are negligible). Even more enragingly, as Mother Jones’ Julianne McShane pointed out, several of these “experts” seemed to deny the gravity and even existence of the reason many patients might choose antidepressants to begin with: perinatal depression itself. Dr. Roger McFillin, a psychologist and anti-vaccine advocate, suggested that women are “naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely, and those are gifts,” not “symptoms of a disease.” FDA Chief Dr. Martin Makary opted to discuss the “root causes” of perinatal depression, like the lack of “healthy relationships” and “natural light exposure,” rather than the immediate solutions patients need. And a third male panelist, Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, who runs a clinic that helps people wean off psychiatric medications, claimed that symptoms of depression “are not things to be fixed with medical intervention.” As a very pregnant person who’s intimately aware of the havoc hormones can wreak, these words make my blood boil–no, incinerate. With my first child, I had clinical anxiety, both during and after my pregnancy. It cost me a lot: sleep, relaxation, closeness with my partner, peace with my baby. I’m a white, educated woman who’s squarely in the demographic of people who take SSRIs most frequently, yet the stigma was still too strong for me to seriously consider the drugs. I gutted it out for far too long, and it was tough to claw my way back. But halfway through this pregnancy, as the memory of those dark times loomed, I gingerly asked my midwife whether she thought a low dose of SSRIs would prevent a disastrous redo. It was only after she reassured me it was safe and effective, sending me links to several studies, that I started taking a prophylactic dose of Zoloft in preparation for birth. Among the FDA panel’s proposed solutions was to slap a black-box warning about the use of SSRIs during pregnancy. This kind of warning might very well have deterred me–someone with a lot of access to information. I can only imagine how many more suffering women it could discourage. Like many issues the MAHA movement focuses on, this one dovetails with legitimate concerns about the overprescribing of SSRIs and the lack of holistic support for people struggling with their mental health. Those are real problems. But steering new moms away from evidence-based help can only lead to harm. “So many women I see feel guilty about taking medications,” Dr. Nancy Byatt, a perinatal psychiatrist at the UMass Chan Medical School, told The New York Times after she watched the FDA panel. “They think they should ignore their needs for their babies. And I think it could make their decisions a lot harder … because it could cause unnecessary alarm.” The Department of Health and Human Services has refused to comment on future policy decisions, but in the meantime, you can still get accurate pregnancy information from ACOG and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
 WHAT ALL THE AI CHATBOTS ARE GOING TO START SOUNDING LIKE ONCE THEY BECOME UNWOKED.
 THE UNINSURED ICON. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 Three Questions About...Baby SleepWe spoke with Dr. Harvey Karp, inventor of the SNOO, about soothing the ills of modern parenthood.BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ  DR. KARP, BABY WHISPERER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Whether or not you know Dr. Harvey Karp by name, you’ve probably absorbed his influence on baby sleep and soothing. The resurgence of the swaddle? The ubiquity of white noise in babies’ rooms? Cribbed (no pun intended) from Dr. Karp’s bestselling book The Happiest Baby on the Block. And he’s probably best known for SNOO, a pricey “smart bassinet” that rocks and jiggles a strapped-in baby all night long. In my ninth month of pregnancy, I spoke with Dr. Karp about the evolution of his signature product, what nuclear families are missing, and why sleep is a feminist issue. When SNOO first came out in 2016, it was a signifier of luxury–Beyoncé and Jay Z reportedly owned several. Now, it’s used in hospitals, including to soothe babies who were born dependent on opiates, and you’re working to have SNOO covered by Medicaid. That seems like quite a shift–how did that come about? Yes, SNOO was really known as this bougie baby bed in the beginning, but the goal was always to make it accessible to everyone. We built the bed to be reused over and over again. It’s sort of the way breast pumps started out: There were these industrial breast pumps and they were too expensive for people to buy, but you could rent them. And so, our goal was always to have SNOO be either rented or for free, and not to be purchased and owned. We have a project going on in Wisconsin right now, where hundreds of [SNOOs] are being given to families who have premature infants, mostly Medicaid recipients. Our job is to develop the science to convince Medicaid payers that we can save money and improve outcomes. We’ve also had a lot of success with companies offering SNOO as an employee benefit. Now, tens of thousands of people get a free SNOO rental from their employer, from big companies like Dunkin' Donuts to the largest duck farm in America. You often say that SNOO can help replenish what we’ve lost in terms of the extended family and support for new parents. But I think some people still feel a little funny about swapping out human cuddles for a machine. What do you say to that? Yes, a hundred years ago, and for the entire history of humanity, we had extended families, and people lived right next door to their grandmother, their aunt, their sister, and everybody shared the work. Then we moved to the city or moved hours away from our family, and women got more work responsibilities outside the home. This became pretty crushing on parents, especially single parents. So the SNOO goal is to be a helper. It's there in the home when you're cooking dinner, when you’re taking a shower, when you're playing with your three-year-old, when you are getting some sleep. It’s not set it and forget it, but it can give you 20 to 30 minutes here and there, as well as giving an extra hour or even up to two hours of extra sleep. In the womb, the baby is being held 24/7. Then they’re born, and 12 hours a day we put them in a dark quiet room. That’s sensory deprivation compared to what they had before they were born. So why, because you only have a few people in your family, should the baby miss out? SNOO…doesn’t replace what the parents would be doing, because no one can rock them all night long. It just gives the baby a little extra. When I had my first baby, sleep was a locus of inequality in my relationship–my male partner was obviously getting more of it, especially because I was riddled with anxiety about whether my baby was safe. Sleep became a feminist issue in my mind. How do you see SNOO responding to these gender dynamics, which seem to be common? We’ve definitely moved in the direction of gender equality, but we’re still far from it. Even when the baby is sleeping, sometimes moms are awake and anxious knowing that they have to get up in three hours. SNOO can help with that: There have been studies reporting that SNOO reduces maternal depression and maternal stress. There are five things that trigger depression and anxiety that SNOO improves: up to 41 minutes more sleep for mothers per night, reduced infant crying, less anxiety that the baby is in danger, the feeling that you have a support system, and [the fact that it] makes you feel like you’ve gotten things managed better. Also, men very often take on the role of being the sleep experts when they have a SNOO in the house. Men want to manage this gadget. That takes a burden off the shoulders of the mom. This conversation was made possible by Happiest Baby, a sponsor of UNDISTRACTED with Brittany Packnett Cunningham.  WEEKEND READING 📚On the boys: Everyone’s worried about young men, but are we maybe blowing the “boy crisis” out of proportion? (The New York Times) On boobs: We’re all thinking about them. And apparently so is American Eagle. (TCF Emails) On the genius invested in women’s sports: The WNBA is in the midst of negotiations for a better bargaining agreement. They’ve got a Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences on their side. (Sports Illustrated)  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Doctors Finally Admit IUDs Hurt
  May 21, 2025 Greetings, Meteor readers, Last Friday, I had the immense pleasure of seeing Real Women Have Curves on Broadway. In a world where people are being violently rounded up and inhumanely detained, it was reinvigorating to watch a story so steeped in Latinx culture and the resilience of immigrant women. I laughed, I cried, I developed a crush on Claudia Mulet, and I vowed to be louder about the injustices of our anti-immigrant regime.  IF ALL THESE WOMEN DON'T GET TONYS, I WILL RIOT IN THE STREETS. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) In today’s non-musical-theater news, we explain the latest “discovery” about IUD insertion. Plus, a new law banning revenge porn is finally on the books. No soy de aquí, pero tu tampoco, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONBetter late than never: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has released new recommendations around cervical and uterine procedures, most notably IUD insertion. On the heels of similar guidance released by the CDC last year, ACOG has discovered not only that IUD insertion can be excruciatingly painful to patients, but that there is an “urgent need” for clinicians to offer pain management. Sorta like when Columbus discovered America. And by that, I mean many of us were already here. Women have been complaining about the pain caused by IUD insertions for years, and the people doing the inserting famously underestimate it; one study from 2014 found that while doctors were rating the pain of IUD insertion a 35 out of 100, patients ranked it at more like 65. This probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has either visited a gynecologist or been on the internet: Women’s pain, particularly around reproductive health, is often dismissed as either exaggerated or simply part and parcel of ✨being a woman✨. Think Serena Williams nearly dying in childbirth after her pain was ignored, or the women at the Yale fertility clinic who were unwittingly undergoing egg retrievals without pain relief and told their agony was normal. Unlike the CDC recommendation, ACOG also recommends pain management for a variety of procedures like endometrial biopsy, polypectomy, hysteroscopy, and certain kinds of imaging. And ACOG acknowledges structural inequities: “The way pain is understood and managed by health-care professionals is also affected by systemic racism and bias of how pain is experienced,” its findings note. “Historically, Black patients have received less analgesics than white patients, and women have received less attention to their pain than men undergoing similar procedures.” This change, of course, does not guarantee painless IUD insertions; there’s only so much lidocaine can do. But the guidance is important because it encourages doctors to have conversations they might have once deemed unnecessary, including ones around anxiety that patients might feel about undergoing some procedures (anxiety which ACOG suggests can be addressed with medication). As someone who was prescribed Xanax to make it through a dental procedure, I think it’s wild that stronger medications aren’t regularly offered when someone burrows a medical device up your cervix. So if you’ve got an appointment coming up, be vocal! We’ve already suffered enough–we deserve the good drugs. AND:
 REGINA VENTURA OUTSIDE OF THE COURTHOUSE. (GETTY IMAGES)
 CLARK AND REESE MEETING AT MID-COURT AHEAD OF THE GAME AND THE FOUL HEARD ROUND THE WORLD. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Is “Divine Intuition” a Health Fix?
  May 8, 2025
Greetings, Meteor readers, It’s my daughter’s third birthday this weekend, and she has requested–in her exact words—“a pink beautiful sparkly glittery jewel-y dress” so she can look “extra-princess-y!!!” It really does start this young, y’all. Time for me to revisit Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter. Today we’re digging into Trump’s new and disconcerting pick for Surgeon General. Plus, a new (American!) pope, and an interview with author Amanda Hess about how technology mediates our experience of pregnancy and motherhood. Happy sparkly Mother’s Day to me, Nona Willis Aronowitz  WHAT'S GOING ONThe wellness-to-MAGA pipeline: Did you think the stream of horrifying Trump nominees was over? Not quite. Yesterday, President Trump announced that he was withdrawing his pick for Surgeon General, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, and replacing her with far-right wellness influencer Dr. Casey Means. In his announcement, Trump praised Dr. Means by touting her “impeccable ‘MAHA’ credentials,” and he isn’t wrong: The nominee and her brother, former lobbyist Calley Means, are vocal allies of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and were close advisors during his 2024 presidential bid. But here’s the real issue: Dr. Means–who has an inactive medical license and dropped out of her surgical residency program–regularly expresses skepticism of mainstream medicine, including vaccines, fluoride, raw milk bans, and birth control, which she has called a “disrespect for life.” (In fact, she’s become the nominee because her predecessor, Nesheiwat, had been targeted by Trump confidant Laura Loomer and other far-right activists for praising the COVID vaccines.) She frequently casts doubt on the value of science itself: “Of COURSE we should trust our heart intelligence and divine intuition instead of BLINDLY trusting ‘the science,’” Dr. Means wrote in an Instagram post last year. Putting “science” in scare quotes…not exactly a reassuring sign.  It remains to be seen whether Dr. Means will be confirmed by the Senate; Trump’s nomination of Dave Weldon for CDC head was jettisoned after concerns over Weldon’s claims that vaccines cause autism. (They don’t.) But assuming she does get the job, the question becomes: What do Surgeon Generals actually do? They aren’t directly involved in implementing health policy, but they can often set the government’s priorities. C. Everett Coop, Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General, was famously influential in changing the public’s view on smoking and, according to the New York Times, “single-handedly pushed the government into taking a more aggressive stand against AIDS.” Some have tried pushing the limits: When Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders gave the thumbs up to masturbation and encouraged Americans to “get over their love affair of the fetus and start worrying about children,” President Bill Clinton fired her. More recently, President Joe Biden’s Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, made waves when he called for a warning label on social media. In other words: Surgeon Generals don’t make laws, but they are a major source of information and influence, which makes Dr. Means’ nomination all the more worrying. Will she further legitimize vaccine skepticism and accelerate measles outbreaks? Will she give a boost to raw milk amid a bird flu epidemic? Will she stigmatize birth control at a time when it’s already under attack? Time to once again call your senators; here’s a useful script from 5Calls. AND:
 POPE LEO AT HIS PREDECESSOR’S FUNERAL LAST MONTH. VIA GETTY IMAGES
  Three Questions About….Modern MotherhoodAmanda Hess’s new memoir interrogates how technology changes the experience of early parenting and pregnancy.From the moment her period app detected she was pregnant, journalist Amanda Hess experienced motherhood through the prism of her phone, from chirpy pregnancy apps to momfluencers on Instagram. Then, at 29 weeks pregnant, her son was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition called Beckwith-Wiedmann Syndrome, and everything changed. In her new memoir, Second Life, she grapples with deeply held assumptions–both society’s and her own–about normalcy, public performance, and disability. Let’s talk about that pivotal moment when your son is diagnosed with BWS. Can you describe some ways the diagnosis changed you? I did not realize to what extent I had absorbed all of these cultural messages about what pregnancy, motherhood, and babies are supposed to be like. For such a long time, I didn’t even care about whether or not I became a mom. But when I became pregnant, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t messing it up. I internalized this idea that it’s a woman’s job to reproduce healthy, normal, productive citizens–although I never would have put it that way. I was going to these sites and apps not even for advice–I didn’t do most of the stuff they suggested–but more to understand the role I was expected to play, even if I wasn’t necessarily complying. And then when my child was diagnosed late in my pregnancy, it struck me as a tragic thing to happen, as a crisis. Most pregnancy technology is geared toward a “normal” pregnancy, so the moment there was the slightest deviation in my pregnancy, I was out of the “normal” zone and initially felt very abandoned. It was only after my son was put in this human context, after he was born, that I could see him as my son and not a medical idea. And ironically, the internet helped with this: I found some other, helpful online communities–ones that were comprised of real human beings who were convening around BWS (as opposed to some app that only knew my due date and nothing else about me). As you mention in the book, pregnancy has long been a site of state surveillance, but that fact feels even more true lately. Does your research take on a more sinister cast in an era when pregnancy is increasingly criminalized? Yes, there is this ramping up on pregnancy surveillance and also surveillance of people with disabilities. Our medical information is seemingly being seized by government workers we don’t even know. What’s clarifying is that even as it’s changing technological shape, the ideologies are really similar to eugenic [and pro-natalist] thinking that were in vogue 100 years ago. I think we need to balance the new threats–the way all of our data can be scraped by young programmers who are working for Elon Musk–with the knowledge that [throughout American history] our doctors and hospitals have been giving up pregnant people’s information and long been using it to criminalize pregnancy and remove their children. Still, I do have more specific fears for my actual family than I did before. My book talks about how protective wealth and status and whiteness can be in these situations, but the intensity of surveillance now on anyone who has any kind of difference is at a new level, and it really implicates my family. One of the most absorbing parts of the book is when you talk about your obsession with the free-birthing movement, where women give birth without any medical intervention or prenatal care. What was so intriguing to you about them? On the one hand, our experiences of pregnancy could not be more different. My pregnancy ended up being intensely medically monitored: I gave birth in a specific hospital so we could have access to this higher-level NICU–which I came to see as such a blessing. This group of women were on the opposite extreme; many of them don’t get traditional prenatal care. But there were places where our two experiences overlapped. I had this overwhelming need to try to control the uncontrollable by deep-Googling medical information. With them, it was much more about these holistic practices like sunbathing or whatever, but we were both practicing these different modes of control. And those two practices and ideologies both have this tenuous relationship to disability. In this highly technological space I was in, I saw a lot of erasure of the reality of disability, and the assumption that you’d want to avoid it at all costs…[but] then there was this idea in the natural-birth communities that any medical care was unacceptably unnatural, and that some children are fated to die in the womb or at birth because it’s what God intended. Both are eugenic ideas, in their own ways.  WEEKEND READING 📚On the new normal: Everyone is cheating their way through college with ChatGPT, and professors have no idea what to do about it. (New York Magazine) On realism: Writer and illustrator Mona Chalabi explains how she created the hijabi mom character in the animated TV show #1 Happy Family USA. (The Guardian) On mifepristone: You may have been pleasantly surprised to hear that the Trump administration recently defended the abortion pill against a lawsuit. Don’t get too excited, warns law professor Mary Ziegler. (Slate) An earlier version of the headline contained an error; Dr. Means wrote of “divine intuition,” not “divine intervention.”  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
The New Binge Drinkers
  April 17, 2025 Dearest Meteor readers, I’m feeling tender this week and I’m gonna blame Dying For Sex, the new FX miniseries about actual death, the little death, and ride-or-die friendship. The final episode had me in a puddle the other day. Highly rec’d if you’re a fan of Michelle Williams and/or catharsis.  Today, we dig into a surprising new statistic about young women and drinking. Plus, affirmative action for white men and justice for Black mothers. Still sniffling, Nona Willis Aronowitz  WHAT'S GOING ONA sobering new study: If your image of a young binge-drinker is a frat boy doing keg stands, you’re out of date, according to a new analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association. While drinking among young people is declining overall and older women still drink less than older men, women ages 18 to 25 now binge-drink slightly more than their male counterparts. (Binge-drinking is defined as regularly having more than four drinks in one sitting for women and more than five drinks for men; the study compared data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health between 2017-2019 and 2021-2023.) Women’s drinking habits have been catching up to men’s for decades, and scholars, journalists, and public health advocates have been noting the results: Women are increasingly dying, getting sick, and going to the ER from drinking. And why are we drinking more? It’s partly because of stress. (Research indeed shows that women are more likely to drink in order to cope than men. See also: “Mommy wine culture.”) The pandemic seems to have compounded the problem; articles and studies have abounded since 2020 showing how much more women were drinking to get through their days. Women, some have concluded, “need an intervention.” (Others, as one Meteor commenter put it a few months back, are “tired of being targeted for all the things.”)  But what accounts for younger women binge-drinking more than younger men? The study was careful not to draw conclusions; the authors say that because the groups analyzed in each time period are not the same people, they don’t know whether we’re seeing an actual rise among young women or, perhaps, a decline among men. But Susan Stewart, a professor of sociology at Iowa State University who studies alcohol use among women, has an initial hypothesis: “I think it has to do with women’s independence,” she says. “Young people are dating and having sex at lower rates, and less interested in serious relationships. Women are doing their own thing, which includes partying.” Stewart also points out that young women have higher rates of college completion than men, and college students binge-drink more than their non-college peers. It’s too early to tell whether this will be a longterm trend, Stewart says, but it could just be a side effect of an otherwise encouraging phenomenon: “women exercising a greater latitude of freedom.” In any case, it doesn’t hurt to familiarize yourself with the most recent health guidelines on drinking. And yes, alcohol can be a source of great pleasure—but in case you are struggling, there’s help to be had. AND:
 THE TRANS RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN SCOTLAND HAS BEEN FIGHTING FOR YEARS. VIA GETTY IMAGES
 WEEKEND READING 📚On the bigger picture: The CEO of the Society for Women’s Health Research breaks down exactly how Trump-era NIH cuts will affect women’s health. (XX Factor) On the man at the center of a crisis: Here’s what to know about Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man unjustly trapped in a notorious prison in El Salvador. (The Guardian) On playing the game: Fox Sports host Joy Taylor talks to Irin Carmon about work, beauty, and those sexual harassment lawsuits. (The Cut)  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
