Jessica Simpson Gives Birth to Son, Ace Knute Johnson

Jessica Simpson gave birth to her second child, a boy named Ace Knute Johnson, yesterday, Us Weekly reports. The name is pronounced "Ace Ka-nute," and he is fourteen months younger than sister Maxwell Drew Johnson. Ace and Maxwell's father is former NFL tight end Eric Johnson.

According to the Social Security baby name registry, Ace was the 524th most popular name for newborn American boys in 2012.

Knute was last popular in 1893. Update: Knute "honors Johnson's Swedish grandfather." It has also come to my attention that Ronald Reagan was in a football movie called Knute Rockne All American during his acting days.

If you're still feeling haughty about celebrity baby names, read this article and repent.

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Kanye Too ‘Squeamish’ to Watch Kim Give Birth — Is That Weird?

Kim Kardashian's relationship with Kanye West began with the most photographed first date in the history of mass media, but since then, they have been apart more often than not. As of April, they had spent approximately three quarters of Kim's pregnancy in different cities. Kanye was not in the room when Kim discovered their baby's gender. (Discussion of his penis, however, was.) Now a rumor has emerged that Kanye "won't physically be in the delivery room" when Kim gives birth because "he's very squeamish and doesn't want to be around blood."

Is that normal? When did fathers become a mandatory presence in delivery rooms, anyway?

In the first half of the twentieth century, fathers who witnessed childbirth were a small minority, explains a BBC feature tracing the history of Western dads in the delivery room. (Exception to the rule: The notoriously baby-averse Queen Victoria enjoyed "the great comfort and support [that] my beloved Albert was to me during the whole time" of her first son's birth.) The sea change began in the mid-sixties, spurred in part by obstetrician Robert Bradley's popular 1965 book Husband-Coached Childbirth. Paired with the rise of the Lamaze technique, fathers increasingly ended up in the delivery room as hee-hee-hoo-ing birth assistants. BBC's experts estimate that three quarters of British dads were in the delivery room by the late seventies. Modern U.S. and U.K. estimates range from 75 to 90 percent. A 2003 study found that 93 percent of fathers who live with their partners witness their children's births; most men absent from the delivery room are also absent from the mother's life. Delivery-room dads are more likely to experience PTSD than their female counterparts — both because they are "fully aware" of the "extremely vivid" pain and gore, and because they are powerless.

Gordon Ramsay skipped four childbirths out of fear that his sex life "would be damaged by images like something out of a sci-fi movie—skinned rabbits and conger eels coming at me from everywhere. I didn't want that to be in my memory. Seeing a woman in distress, screaming at the top of her voice, pushing, pushing, pushing, and sweat, sweat, sweat? I'd rather be stark-bollock naked in a steam room with 50 vegans." His wife's response, according to Ramsay: "I don't want you there. I don't feel attractive." As far as acceptable moments to stop worrying about female attractiveness go, "busy bringing a new human into the world" strikes me as a good one, but to each her own.

There is nonetheless a (convoluted) kernel of wisdom in paying attention to how male squeamishness may affect a childbearing woman. John Kennell, a childbirth researcher at Case Western University School of Medicine, finds that women giving birth with the support of another woman choose fewer pain-reducing measures during birth. They are 60 percent less likely to ask for an epidural and half as likely to have a C-section. In The Doula Book, Kennell and two co-authors cite studies of male behavior during childbirth and theorize that the father's anxiety influences the mother. Nonetheless Kennell says he isn't discouraging paternal presences from delivery rooms. Rather, he proposes moving away from Bradley's "husband-coached childbirth" model and toward the use of doulas, trained (and historically female) specialists who provide information, coaching, and support during labor.

Nonetheless, delivery-room absence in the name of squeamishness generally draws rebuke. "Nowadays any self-respecting father has to be there — blood, gore, and all, standing there smiling," a D.C. obstetrician told the Washington Post in 2006. Or, as one woman put it in a discussion on WhatToExpect.com, "Was he too squeamish to impregnate you? I feel that if you aren't able to go in a store and buy condoms you shouldn't have sex. By that same reasoning, if he is too squeamish for labor and delivery, he should have been buying condoms."

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Reproductive Coercion: When Men Sabotage Birth Control

Lindsay Clark, M.D., couldn't figure out why her patients were getting pregnant. An obstetrics and gynecology resident in Rhode Island, she was treating women who very recently had been pregnant, or had come to her with the opposite intent. “I wondered why women were getting pregnant so soon after they came to me for birth control counseling,” she told the Cut. “I became interested in the idea that women might not have as much control over their birth control as they think.”

Surveying 641 women who received routine ob-gyn care at Providence’s Women and Infants Hospital, Clark found that 16 percent had received unwelcome pressure to get pregnant. Their boyfriends and partners made it hard for them to use birth control — poking holes in condoms or hiding their pills — or threatened to leave or harm them if they didn’t get pregnant.

If you don’t hear much these days about the stereotypical gold digger who lies about being on the pill to ensnare a man into marriage or eighteen years of child support payments, that may be because doctors are now being told to look for just the opposite: The woman whose partner sabotages her birth control. She’s not so hard to find.

Early this year, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued a committee recommendation urging ob-gyns to screen patients for these behaviors, collectively known as reproductive coercion. Whether women were in for an annual exam, a pregnancy test, or a second trimester visit, it recommended asking questions like, “Does your partner support your decision about when or if you want to become pregnant?”

The ACOG’s strategy reflects a growing body of research that identifies reproductive coercion as a unique form of domestic or intimate partner violence, and offers an explanation for the high rates of unintended pregnancies among women in abusive relationships. Increasingly, birth-control sabotage is viewed as a tool not for baby-crazed female stalkers, but for a class of predominantly male abusers who want to exercise control over their partner’s body, make her dependent upon them, or secure a long-term presence in her life.

One of the subject’s leading experts, the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh's chief of adolescent medicine Elizabeth E. Miller, M.D., Ph.D., began looking into the phenomenon less than a decade ago, after seeing a 15-year-old patient who said her boyfriend only used condoms some of the time. Rather than asking whether the boyfriend refused her request to use condoms, she assumed the patient needed to be educated about birth control. Two weeks later, the girl was in the emergency room with a severe head injury. “Personally, it was incredibly destabilizing,” Miller recalled. “It was like, ‘How could I have missed this?” Later, she interviewed girls who were known to have been in violent relationships for a 2007 paper on the topic. “A quarter of them said, ‘He was trying to get me pregnant.'”

In Miller’s 2010 study, one of the largest on reproductive coercion to date, 15 percent of 1,300 women who visited federal- and state-subsidized California family-planning clinics had their birth control sabotaged. One in five had been urged by a boyfriend not to use birth control, or told by a boyfriend he would leave her if she wouldn’t get pregnant. A larger portion of respondents, 35 percent, who reported intimate partner violence (IPV) also reported birth-control sabotage.

Because Miller’s study examined low-income-friendly clinics — and because domestic violence disproportionately affects low-income women — some have conjectured that reproductive coercion is a classed issue. But Dr. Clark’s survey, which looked at a general population of patients, with and without private insurance, suggests birth-control sabotage and pregnancy coercion happen at a similar rate across socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. In her study, the single highest risk factor for reproductive coercion was being unmarried and sexually active.

Miller’s co-author Rebecca Levenson, a senior policy analyst for Futures Without Violence, said she expects more and diverse women will come forward as information about reproductive coercion spreads and women recognize it as a kind of abuse. “Naming something is powerful,” she said. But first, she hopes the research will inform the many doctors who are in a position to directly intervene and reduce the reproductive harm facing IPV victims — be it an unwanted pregnancy, an expensive abortion, or the unhappy extension of a bad relationship — but don’t know to ask. Harm-reduction strategies range from offering birth control or emergency contraceptives in plain packaging to switching women to a stealthier method, like Depo Provera hormone shots or an IUD with the strings clipped.

Levenson described a 17-year-old she interviewed whose boyfriend claimed the condom broke six times in a row before she sought out Depo Provera for herself. This was before reproductive coercion was widely discussed, she said, but “Imagine how powerful it would be if when she went to the clinic the clinician would say, ‘Hey, you’ve come in for emergency contraceptive three times. Are you at all worried about that?’”

When Futures Without Violence took their findings to Eve Espey, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of New Mexico and an author of the ACOG’s committee opinion, she was “totally embarrassed,” she said. “I’ve always asked patients about intimate partner violence, but I had not asked specifically about reproductive coercion,” she told the Cut. “I was amazed that a seasoned ob-gyn like I am was not aware of that as an entity.”

Once she became aware, she wasn’t surprised how common it was among her patients. In addition to the IUD and the shot, in some cases Espey recommends patients switch to a non-hormonal IUD because “there are some men who count the days of women’s periods,” which can be fewer if she’s on hormonal birth control. “When people have power and control needs, they will seek the information,” she explained.

Citing the high rate of response to her survey, Dr. Clark told the Cut that patients are equally quick to identify reproductive coercion once aware of its existence. “In my practice, they say, ‘Oh, I’ve never really thought about it like that, but, yeah, I do get pressure,'” she said. “Women want to talk about it.” Finally, they will have someone with whom they can.

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