What a day. It started with a really awful night.

Y'all know that my body has been through the wringer. There’s the whole falling-of-the-cliff gig. There’s the broken neck thing. And then there’s the gave-birth-to-a-baby-with-a-15-inch-head incident, which tore my cervix, caused permanent damage to my lower spine and even made my hips hemorrhage internally. (Can they really do that? Yes. TMI? Sorry, I’m a journalist. There's never any such thing as TMI.)

Somehow yesterday I did violence to myself and set off the lower spine problem. I’ve had physical therapy, massage, steroid injections and every other thing that can be done short of that special Klingon spine replacement surgery they do for Worf on Star Trek. I would sign up for trials for that, but no one’s doing them yet...

To make a boring story shorter, I couldn’t even lie down last night without serious pain. I finally took narcotics and got maybe four hours. What does a newspaper E-in-C do she's been awake all night? She gets up and goes to work.

Today was our press day — and we made our deadline — but it was also the day I was supposed to meet the president of Colorado’s Senate to see whether there was any chance of getting legislation going to make it illegal to put women inmates in chains when they're in labor.

And... It went really, really well. I took the packet of materials I had put together out of my own research on the topic, met with him privately in his office, and gave him my impassioned plea to end this practice. He got a funny look on his face and said, “Do you mean to say that they actually shackle a woman by her wrist or ankle to a hospital bed even though she’s already under armed guard?” And I said, “Yes."


Elated, I left his office and got lost. Then I got on the elevator and meant to go to a different floor and wondered why the elevator wasn’t moving. Then I realized I kept pushing the button for the second floor... and I was on the second floor. And that explained why the lobbyist in the elevator was giving me strange looks.



So there’s a lot more to do to get this effort underway, but I feel things are converging. When I got back to the office — which entailed driving through a short blizzard — I found I had a message from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) saying that they had hoped to get legislation rolling about this for next year but that if I already had something underway they’d throw their weight behind it. And so it’s on!

I feel very happy about this. It’s something I’ve tried to make happen for a long time, but I haven’t been able to persuade a lawmaker to take up the challenge. Now I’ve done the research they’ll need to pass the bill, and I’m willing to throw the newspaper behind it. Is that objective journalism? Do I care?

Back when the Founders created the First Amendment, newspapers played an advocacy role on behalf of things they believed were important issues. Nowadays “advocacy” is saved for the editorial pages. But sometimes that’s not enough.

Too many people don’t care about women, and especially about women in prison. I have to change that somehow. I can’t exactly say why this became so important to me, but it is. When my mother told a friend what I was working on, her friend said, “Well, I guess they shouldn't have landed in prison.”

But birth impacts the baby, too. And no prison sentence should include being chained while doing that uniquely beautiful thing that only women can do — bringing a new life into the world.

I am staking myself to this one.

I know it has nothing to do with fiction or Naked Edge, which I’m supposed to be promoting now with tireless zeal. And though it was mentioned in Unlawful Contact through the character of Megan, it really has nothing to do with my novels. But it has to do with what’s important to me on a soul-deep level. And so here it is.

If you’re interested in checking on or changing the policies in your state, please let me know! I’ll hook you up. If you want me to blog on this topic, baby, I’m all yours.

Time for more percocet... If only I had some chocolate!

Now back to your regularly

I'll admit it. I'm a sucker for it. And I'm not even sure why.

When I wrote Ride the Fire, I was pretty sure the story was going to tank. It contained so many forbidden elements, foremost among them a heroine who was heavily pregnant with a baby that wasn't the hero's. I didn't care. The story had fallen into my heart in one big chunk, and I wanted to write what I saw because to me it was beautiful. A tortured man and an abused woman find themselves alone together in the midst of a violent frontier and, by working together, slowly overcome their own horror and fall in love.

I was also determined to write a more realistic birth scene than one gets from, say, television. Having given birth twice — once without so much as an IV or an aspirin — I really wanted to do justice to this very feminine experience of childbirth. So often, it's glossed over, and yet it is an amazing, horrible, terrifying, exciting and transformative experience for women. I've always felt our society doesn't give the act of giving birth the respect it deserves. (In ancient Sparta, for example, women who died in childbirth were given the same honors as men who died in battle. Can you imagine that here? But I digress...)


Of course, once you have a baby you have to feed it, so I include breastfeeding, which was the only way to nourish a baby in historical times and is still the best way to feed a child. I nursed my oldest till he was 15 months old and my younger son till he was 10 months old, at which time I was in the hospital for a while and he was weaned by circumstance, not choice. Neither received formula or bottles.



In my other novels, both contemporary and historical, the HEA often involves a new baby, though not always. I'm conscious of the fact that I tend to include that and have tried to veer away from it so that it doesn't become repetitious for you all to read. But there's something about pregnancy and new babies that adds to the HEA for me, at least.

In historicals, of course, it's realistic. I always find it strange and unrealistic when a man and woman in a historical romance can get it on for several weeks or even months and not make a baby. In contemporary novels, it depends on how careful the hero and heroine choose to be, so it's completely realistic that the heroine might not get pregnant. Still, it adds to the sense of fulfillment at the end of the story if I know that a baby is on the way.

Why do I feel that way? Not sure. I guess that children, for me, are the outcome of deepest true love between a man and a woman. They represent the love the hero and heroine have for one another.

I've caught some heat for having birth scenes that are detailed and for including breastfeeding. One reader emailed me and asked, "Can't we just assume that she nurses the baby? Why do you have to show it?"

I show it because I think it's beautiful. The same is true of pregnancy and birth. They're beautiful and natural and the outcome of the hero and heroine's passion for one another. Also, they're a very real part of many women's experience of life and are far too often hidden to society's detriment, I believe.

But that's just how I feel.

So what do you think? Does pregnancy and/or birth enrich the HEA? And what about breastfeeding?