Now with health reform on everyone’s mind, a few specialists are claiming that reimbursement for fertility treatments—even paying for pricey in vitro fertilization—is cost-effective. The thinking is that when couples with fertility problems do not have to worry about the cost, they will try to get pregnant the healthier way—with fewer embryos per try. That may mean more bouts of IVF, but it would also mean a reduced risk of having triplets, quadruplets, and even more babies at once. So-called high-order multiples are likely to be born early, needing costly care in the neonatal intensive care unit and often lifetime care as well. So a few tries of IVF—at about $10,000 per month—is cheaper than hundreds of thousands of dollars to care for each premature baby. One doctor estimated that it costs about $200,000 door-to-door for one 26-week-old. And that's just considering the initial hospital fees, not the possibility of long-term care. And what about the emotional impact on parents from the either death of a premature child or a child with a chronic illness?

Tags: insurance coverage of infertility, IVF

There's an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal by a man named David Lapp who got married when he was 22 and his bride was 21. He argues that getting married young is ideal, because you can pay off debts together and form marital friendship bonds, like the cartoons in the movie Up. As WSJ commenter Eric Bradbury writes, "It was starting to read like a fairy tale, and then I came across the reference to Disney characters ... "

Lapp is right—people who get married in their teens have incredibly high divorce rates, but beyond that, there is not much difference between getting married at 21, like his bride did, and getting married at 26,  the current median age of marriage for women in the United States. You can pay off debts and be best buddies with your spouse in your late 20s or early 30s just as easily as you can in your early 20s. Lapp himself even quotes a University of Texas study that says, "Little or nothing is likely to be gained by deliberately delaying marriage beyond the mid twenties." Since nothing is lost either, what's the rush? Lapp is using what boils down to an anecdote—he and his wife Amber are happy, so early marriage is tops!—to make a larger argument, and it doesn't really hold water. Lapp also conveniently quotes a study by the Institute for American Values, and his byline tells us he is a research associate at that institution.

Last year, the Washington Post's Michael Gerson made a similar entreaty to young people to get married—but his was more explicitly moralistic. Gerson says that a prolonged period of singledom leads "to emotional and physical wreckage," while Lapp's Disneyfied version of life merely hints at this notion (you spend less extravagantly if you're married, he says). But none of the statistics really support the notion that waiting a few more years is all that destructive, and hand-wringing and flimsy anecdotes aren't really helping the young-marriage cause.

Tags: marriage, wall street journal, young marriage

—Does Rielle Hunter's silence over the last couple of years make her the picture of "quiet dignity"? Tact comes (late) to the arch-mistress? [Newsweek]

—Robin Wells is far more than Paul Krugman's wife, yet she's been consigned, along with Margaret Knox and Sheryl WuDunn, to the ranks of (almost always male) Geniuses' (almost always female) Spouses. [Jezebel, The New Yorker]

—Children conceived through in vitro fertilization and other methods of assisted reproduction have lower birth weights and more "genetic differences" than those cooked up the old-fashioned way, researchers now say. [WSJ]

—The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launches a Web site covering the "Palin Primaries." The goal: to highlight the rift between mainstream Republican candidates and Tea Partiers. Each district's name appears inked on a palm. [Politico]

—Martin Amis is supposedly indignant that Anna Ford called him a narcissist in Sunday's Guardian. It's hard to believe the narcissist finds the public flap all that upsetting. [The Elegant Variation, The Independent, Guardian]

Tags: anna ford, birth weight, dccc, Elizabeth Edwards, headlines, in vitro, infertility treatment, John Edwards, margaret knox, marin amis, palin primaries, paul krugman, rielle hunter, robin wells, sheryl wudunn, tea party, we're talking about

This list from the Daily Beast of "A list" Buddhists shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did, seeing as it is nothing more than a magazine capitalizing on a recent event (Tiger Woods' Buddhism-laced apology) to show a bunch of glamorous photos of celebrities. But looking through the photo essay, I couldn't help but notice that out of 17 celebrities profiled, only two were born into the faith, and the rest are converts. There are more people on the list who are or were converted by Orlando Bloom than who were born into a cultural tradition that incorporates Buddhism. While Buddhism is uniquely situated as welcoming to converts—many people who practice it do so along other religious traditions—this exclusion of nonconverts still bugs.

I hated the Tiger Woods apology with every fiber of my being, but did see his discussion of Buddhism as a potential silver lining in encouraging Americans to embrace religious diversity and religious freedom. It's probably news to a great many American Christians that Buddhism has moral precepts and practices at all; certainly Brit Hume didn't think so. Woods' apology was a teachable moment, as softie liberals like to say. Way too many Americans accept without question right-wing claims that ours is a "Christian nation," and don't stop to think about how immigration from all over the world has brought an influx of believers of Buddhism and Islam, as well as other, smaller religions. (And don't forget atheism.) But a list like this one misrepresents Buddhism, implying that it's more of a Hollywood trend than a long-standing cultural tradition in many parts of Asia.

When one of your two born Buddhists on the list is Uma Thurman—and only two people (Tiger Woods and Keanu Reeves) have any Asian ancestry at all—you're painting a portrait of Buddhism in America that obscures the reality of Buddhism in America. I'm by no means an expert, but I'm going to guess the majority of Buddhists living in America are not Christian or Jewish converts, but are closer to Woods and his Thai-born mother, i.e., Asian-American. But for some reason, this reality doesn't seem to have much influence on this list at all. You can hear that teachable moment passing, and nobody learned a damn thing.

Tags: buddhism, celebrities, Tabloids

Based solely on the advertising, you'd think that the 10 million to 15 million men tuning into the Winter Olympics every night were an entirely different subset—perhaps a whole different species—than the 57 million family-loathing misogynists who watched the Super Bowl. The Olympics ads bring family-friendly to new heights, with parents supporting young athletes and athletes lauding their families. They support girl power, as Gretchen Bleiler snowboards to the moon and hockey-playing little girls tear it up on the ice.

Tablet's Marjorie Ingall lays out the contrast in all of its magnificent glory:

In contrast to the Super Bowl’s “woman as succubus” theme, the Olympics ads depict marriage as a partnership. Parents share driving and child-rearing duties. One ad for GE touts the company’s medical technology: “I’ve seen beautiful things,” intones a middle-aged guy. “But the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is the image on a screen that helped our doctor see that my wife’s cancer was treatable.” If that dude were in a FloTV or Dodge ad, he’d want his wife to die. Then he’d replace her with a more youthful latex version.

Why the difference? Ingalls puts it down to the "[ad] industry's wail of impotent frustration," but I think there's a more insidious reason behind it. Watching sports represents a mixture of fantasy and fandom, and everyone brings to a major sporting event a little personal inner-narrative. The fantasy of football is, for men—and for men only, unlike Olympic sports—one of the road not taken, an irresponsible life of tackling on the field and debauchery off. The fantasy of the Olympics, for that key 18-to-35-year-old demographic, is that somehow, that could be any of us up there (which is the only possible explanation for the popularity of curling)—and now, in four years or eight or 12—our kids could be the ones thanking us in a Visa ad. They aren't different men, and they aren't different advertisers. They're just going after a different little dopamine neuron in the brain.

Photograph of Gretchen Bleiler by AFP Photo/Martin Bureau.

Tags: olympics, Super Bowl

Thank you to everyone who came last night to our fabulous DoubleX event at Housing Works, a panel discussion called "That Not-So-Fresh Feeling: Marketing Embarrassing Products to Women." For those of you who couldn't make the discussion among Target Women creator Sarah Haskins, former Colbert Report executive producer Allison Silverman, and Flow author Susan Kim, here are a few charmingly amateurish videos I took with a flip cam. The lovely panelists spoke hilariously about the ways "fem care" is sold to women—mostly by making us feel ashamed of our natural biological functions. The first video is of Susan Kim, the second is of Sarah Haskins, and the third is of moderator Hanna Rosin chatting with Susan, Sarah, and Allison.

Susan Kim on the history of fem care: "They use rags, they use grass, they use sticks, they use nothing—that's what petticoats were for!"

Sarah Haskins on commercials selling products to women: "Ever since we were borne of Adam's rib we have been flawed, and the only things that will fix us will be sold to us as we watch Project Runway."

Allison Silverman on aspirational tampon ads: "I was struck by all the horseback riding. Things I would never, ever want to do when I was menstruating. I was surprised there was no person comfortably reading a book."

Tags: allison silverman, fem care, hanna rosin, housing works, marketing to women, sarah haskins, susan kim, that not-so-fresh feeling