A Pregnant 2L's Fight for Justice

Plus dating and saints in a writing roundup

I’ve got a little backlog of pieces to share with you (over pie). Starting with a reported piece I wrote for

The Pillar

that came together almost entirely during the four hours of childcare I had on Friday.

It’s about Brittany Lovely, a pregnant 2L at Georgetown Law, who’s been battling her school administration since September to move one exam that conflicted with her due date.

With only a week or two until her baby was due, the school was still denying her requested accommodations and offering her one of three choices:

1. Withdraw from the class.

2. Show up in person on the test day, bleeding and with newborn in tow.

3. Fail.

After all, an administrator told her, “you should have planned better” and “motherhood is not for the faint of heart.”

After exam controversy, Georgetown law students urge policy change

Brittany won an one-time exemption (sometime in between when I interviewed her at 2:30p on Friday and when GULC’s press office finally got back to me at 5:30p).

The school says it’s a “mutually agreeable” solution. Brittany strongly disagrees.

She wants them to change their underlying policy, so that the next mother won’t face the same fight.

I’m really proud of getting to report this out, given Brittany’s urgent deadline. And special thanks to paying Other Feminisms subscribers. That afternoon of babysitting is on you.

Over at First Things, I have a short piece on our dysfunctional dating culture and the reasons why social conservatives shouldn’t shame singles.

The default dating culture does not serve potential parents well. Parents of teens and twenty-somethings need to know that the dating and marriage advice that worked for them is unlikely to work as well for their children. Online dating has surged as the source of relationships, but it has serious drawbacks compared to meeting through friends and offline communities. While connections made through people you already know and like come pre-vetted, online dating means sifting through a carousel of strangers. Connections through existing communities are necessarily limited in scope; apps offer a paradox of choice where men take spammy approaches, knowing their chances of getting a reply are slim. Apps can intensify animosity between the sexes, as men become dispirited and resentful due to constant rejections and women become guarded and angry as they are bombarded by explicit or abusive messages.

As one popular tweet put it, “do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam?” The load-bearing supports for dating and marriage have eroded. Building new ones requires a long-term project of cultural revival. In the meantime, pro-natalists need to be frank about the lack of support and encourage countercultural experimentation and, yes, a little bit of weirdness.

Finally, I got to interview Meg Hunter-Kilmer, author of Saints Around the World (also for

The Pillar

). We love her stories of the saints for children, and I wanted to ask her how she handles the hard parts that parents might find difficult to discuss with preschoolers.

Here’s the part of our conversation that feels most directly germane to Other Feminisms:

There’s a pattern of telling stories about saints, particularly female saints, in which they are depicted as suffering quietly and never complaining. 

How do you think telling children that something which might be a virtue in one life is not necessarily what's asked of you?

I think of St. Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayès, who’s in “Saints Around the World,” she had her eyeball cut out—it wasn’t torture, it was a medical accident and she praised God for it because she loved suffering. 

And I say most people don't experience suffering that way, but it can be helpful to know that this is one way that God can use your suffering. 

I think part of the beauty of having this massive corpus of saints in front of you is that you can see this one saint who was tortured and never complained, and then you see St Eulalia and you’re like, “Oh, she would've punched someone in the throat if they tried to torture her. She was not there for this suffering-in-silence business.”

‘Jesus, you can do what you want!’ - Meg Hunter-Kilmer and the saints

Finally, complicated family travel means we’re seeing people we love, but not having an official Thanksgiving meal anywhere. We’ll live!

I’d like to make a few fun dished, but more spaced out that as one giant feast. I’m definitely making this apple crostata for our home over the weekend. But we have only one reliable meat eater in our five person house, so I’d love a very easy cornish game hen recipe if you’ve got one.