Published by | | | At the start of 2020, Tara Finley and her husband were hoping to get pregnant with a third baby. Now, they're seriously considering scheduling a vasectomy. Finley, 31, lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., with her husband and two sons, ages 18 months and 3. She is adamant about maintaining their compact family of four — a complete reversal from her stance less than one year ago. "We always planned on having three kids," Finley said. Then 2020 happened, and "it felt like everything that could go wrong, did." | | | Finley, who works at a media company, was furloughed early in the pandemic. Although she has started working full time again, "every single sense of power that I didn't even realize could be taken away from me, was, and that is such a scary feeling. Our entire life has been turned upside down." In a time of tremendous uncertainty, getting pregnant — or not — is one of the very few things Finley feels she has control over, she said. "Making sure that we don't add more kids to our plate" became a top priority. For Finley, the tense political climate, the pandemic and, perhaps most significantly, the ensuing financial toll collectively compelled her to rethink all previous pregnancy plans. "I don't know if we're ever going to catch up to the sense of comfort we used to have. We're now going to be on a paycheck-to-paycheck scramble," Finley explained, adding that the compounding stresses of working remotely full time and caring for her children full time solidified her desire to stop having kids. Finley is among the many women who are pausing pregnancy plans during the pandemic. Some are deciding against having any children altogether. An April survey published by Modern Fertility, a company that offers an at-home fertility hormone test, shows that of the 4,000 individuals questioned, 30 percent said they were changing their fertility plans because of the pandemic. Of that group, nearly half are delaying having children, while 26 percent said they are now unsure about having kids at all. If history is an indicator, we should expect a birthrate drop in line with the economic downturn. Despite initial thoughts that mass quarantines could spark a baby boom, experts are, in fact, forecasting a covid-19 "baby bust." | | | | Three need-to-know stories | | (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP) | 01.Cicely Tyson, an actress whose electrifying portrayals of resilient Black women brought some of the first noble, elevating representations of African Americans to a vast television audience, died Jan. 28 at 96. In TV movies, where she made her most enduring mark, she played the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, civil rights activist Coretta Scott King, the inner-city Chicago educator Marva Collins, and the mothers of Rosa Parks and Olympic track star Wilma Rudolph. 02.The discovery of highly transmissible coronavirus variants in the United States has public health experts urging Americans to start wearing two masks, or better yet, to don a fabric mask on top of a surgical one. Meanwhile, the vaccine rollout is underway, and women are shouldering the added responsibility of ensuring their aging parents are vaccinated. 03.After videos recirculated showing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) endorsing conspiracy theories and political violence before she was elected, some Democrats called to expel her from Congress. Separately, freshman Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) claimed a "maskless" Greene berated her and said she was moving her office away from Greene's. | | | | The latest from our video team | | Lawmakers, especially women of color, are still reeling from the trauma of being inside the U.S. Capitol during an attempted insurrection by a pro-Trump mob. But Kamala Harris's history-making inauguration — as America's first woman, first Black American and first Indian American vice president — holds hope. We spoke to four women of color in Congress who say they feel a personal duty to deal with racial inequities in the United States. | | | | A story to make you smile | | Famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman was slated to replace President Andrew Jackson's face on the $20 bill, but in 2019, Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin scuttled those plans. Now, the Biden administration will resume the process. Tubman will become the first Black person on the face of American paper currency and the first woman in generations, writes Jacob Bogage in The Washington Post. | | | | But before we part, some recs | | (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) | Neema Roshania PatelEditor, The LilyWhat I'm listening to:On a recent scroll through Spotify, I found the "Folktronics" playlist. It mixes electronica with Indian folk music and is the perfect evening soundtrack. What I'm doing every morning:Instead of waiting for a natural break in the day — which almost never magically appears — I'm taking walks before signing on, coffee in hand. I refer to it as my commute. What I'm baking with my sourdough discard:I'm using this King Arthur recipe to make English muffins. Nothing like a pandemic to turn you into someone who makes English muffins from scratch. | | | | |
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