05 May 2009

OctoMom and other bits and pieces

Sorry it has been a few days, what an insane week. Teaching is exhausting at the moment so I apologise for silence on my end.

Anyway, I made it to Clunes (a small mining town near Ballarat) this past weekend where a number of antiquarian and second hand booksellers fill every available building in the town with books. I'm always on the look out for great pregnancy/maternity/motherhood stuff and this year I found a huge stack of Australian Women's Weekly mags from the 50s and 60s with some amazing ads for maternity clothes, infant formula and other hilarious enticements for women to really learn to love ironing. I will be scanning some of those images and posting them soon.

In other news, interestingly, it turns out that Nadya Suleman is getting into a bit of hot water over her continual 'exploitation' (in the eyes of California state law) of her babies as she has been contracting them out for photographs and other appearances. Turns out she might be in breach of child labour laws. Attorney Gloria Allred has filed a petition to appoint a guardian for the babies' estate, basically a party that will protect the financial interests of the babies.

"Rather than chose to provide her children with a normal life, their mother, Nadya Suleman, has chosen to commercially exploit them," Allred said. "We believe that the babies are entitled to remuneration since most of the compensation appears to be use of their images."

The goal, she added, is "to be sure that the babies receive their fair share of payments" and that their payments "be placed into separate accounts for them and preserved for them as required by law."

According to California law, when filming or photographing children, a nurse and credentialed studio teacher must be present and children -- ages 15 days to six months -- also can only be at the place of employment for two consecutive hours (between 9:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. or between 2:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.). Infants can't work any more than 20 minutes each day.

Looks like OctoMom just walked into a whole lot of trouble...




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