Two years ago, Tricia Shanks lay stoic atop her doctor’s table and held her breath while waiting for him to deliver the news.  Having already endured a miscarriage, the 28-year-old from Indianapolis, Ind., did not want to be told a second time that artificial insemination had failed.

But Shanks and her husband Pat were well versed in fertility treatment success rates — a baby could never be guaranteed.  So they braced themselves for the worst while the doctor stared at the ultrasound for a protracted amount of time, and motioned to the nurse to bring him Shanks’s file. He was silent.

“Oh, no,” Shanks murmured to herself.  “He doesn’t see a heartbeat.” But as the doctor slowly rotated the screen towards the anxious couple, they understood his unsettled reaction.

Shanks was right; her doctor didn’t see a heartbeat.  He saw three.

Discovering you are pregnant with triplets or more is becoming increasingly unlikely as U.S. fertility clinics, responding to government pressure, are reducing the amount of high-order multiple pregnancies induced by drugs or by treatments such as in vitro fertilization.

Spurred by stories such as that of Nadya Suleman, the California single mom whose octuplets in January brought her total of IVF babies to 14, organizations such as the American Society for Reproductive Medicine are calling on doctors to transfer no more than two embryos per cycle during treatment.  The stricter guidelines, which doctors are not yet legally bound to follow, are working, according to the ASRM. Today, less than 2 percent of all live births are triplets or greater, a number down from 6 percent in 2003.  And while 62 percent of IVF treatments used to involve the transfer of four or more embryos in 1996, 11 percent of fertility clinics now report they use only one embryo.

Doctors claim the motivation to prevent these pregnancies is not because a set of three or four or even eight are unlovable, but because the health risks for both mother and children are much more severe.  Still, plenty of women like Shanks continue to defy the odds and rear multiples despite the lack of sleep and the exorbitant grocery bills.  The work is exhausting, she says, but the rewards are triple-fold.

“I feel like I am almost home free,” said Shanks, now 30, who spoke on the phone while 18-month-old Stella, Morah and Ryan were napping. “These are an exceptionally hard two years, but it’s getting easier. I love watching them learn from each other.” And, she added, it must be so special for them to have constant playmates from the time they were born.

Even though they used fertility treatment, Shanks admitted that she and her husband were shocked to learn that they were expecting three babies instead of one.  They didn’t speak for an hour after leaving the doctor’s office, both consumed with the list of things they needed to do to make room for their expanding family. Buy a bigger car. Buy a bigger house. Find a three-person stroller.

“It was crazy,” Shanks recalled. “We were not set up for this.”

Certainly, the financial burden of providing for trips, quads or quints is one of the greatest challenges that parents of high-order multiples face.  Many couples who have difficulty conceiving have already invested thousands of dollars in fertility treatment by the time they learn that they’re pregnant — the average cost of one cycle of IVF in the U.S. is about $10,000.  Add to that the mountains of diapers and 18 daily jars of Gerber food during their children’s babyhood, nevermind paying three or four times more than the average parent does for college tuition.  But the one thing multiples’ moms and dads really can’t afford to skimp out on is childcare.

“If I had to do it all over again, I would hire someone for at least three days a week,” said Shanks, who manages her toddlers almost entirely by herself while her husband is at work.  “If we couldn’t afford it, we would take out a home equity loan or something, because the extra person is worth the expense.”

Leslie Kirby, a triplet mom from Darien, Conn., agrees.  At age 11, her set of three is well beyond the diaper years, which 47-year-old Kirby can remember only as “a blur.”  But with another daughter in high school in addition to her threesome, she still has her hands full.  That is why she still employs her live-in nanny, who has been with their family since Lindsey, Chandler and Jake were just a month old.

“At 3:00 p.m., after school, we start driving everyone around,” explained Kirby of how she and her nanny execute the routine.  “Everyone has sports or piano lessons or some sort of activity.”

Kirby doesn’t consider herself as a multiples’ mom as much as she does a mother of four,.  A lot has changed since the early days when the most she and her husband could muster for their triplets was zone defense instead of man-to-man.   But that’s not to say it isn’t stressful anymore.

“Bigger kids create bigger problems,” she said.  “When they are little, it is about meeting their survival needs: feeding and changing and sleeping.  Now I am asking if their homework is done, if they are in the right classes, if they’re happy.”

Both Kirby and Shanks were fortunate to have relatively smooth pregnancies, despite the fact that carrying triplets, particularly triplets that occur with the help of drugs or treatment, increases your risk for experiencing complications such as premature labor, premature birth and pre-eclampsia, a condition marked by high blood pressure and protein in the urine that can lead to seizures harmful both to mother and infants.

“The higher number of fetuses, the higher the risk,” said Dr. Louise Tomm, an OBGYN who works in the delivery ward of Duke University Hospital in Durham, N.C.  In the past year, she has helped deliver three sets of IVF triplets, whose labors were more difficult compared to the two sets of spontaneous trips she came across.

“High order multiples almost never go to term,” she added.

This was the case for Manhattanite Laura Doyle, who delivered her triplet girls six and a half weeks early after a very taxing pregnancy in which she suffered a blood clot in her lung as well as a worrying liver condition which convinced her doctors to induce her labor.

“I am just thankful that all my kids are healthy,” said Doyle, whose daughters are now four.  “That is the huge reward that you really appreciate after you go through a horrible pregnancy.  There are a million other stories that don’t end as happy.”

It is these stories that concern health officials who are pushing for tighter legislation on fertility medicine.  Sean Tipton, a spokesperson for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, is pleased that that the rates of high order multiples is finally starting to decrease after the ASRM decreased their recommended number of embryos to be transferred during IVF treatment for the fourth time in ten years.

“We advocate trying to drive towards singleton pregnancies,” he said in a recent phone interview, citing serious health risks such as developmental delays, blindness and prematurity as reasons to prevent the occurrence of high-order multiples.  While many patients have to be discouraged from seeking twins, he said, most people don’t seek triplets.

And, Tipton added, doctors should discuss the option of fetal reduction with the patient.

Fetal reduction is when one or more fetuses are terminated in a multiple pregnancy to increase the chances of carrying the remaining babies to term safely, with minimal risk to the mother and children.   When Kirby and her husband were advised to consider all of their options, they visited a reduction specialist in Manhattan.  They decided against it.

“We were shown this film where a fetus was injected with potassium chloride and I couldn’t sit through it,” she recalled.  “At the end of the day, we would not do that.”

Many organizations that promote raising multiples are avid critics of fetal reduction practice.  Maureen Boyle, a mother of five, founded Mothers of Super Twins (MOST) shortly after her triplets were born in August of 1987—before three-person strollers were available in the U.S.

The group now reaches out to 20,000 families who are seeking advice on everything from how to cook for an army of kids to how to cope with post-partum depression, another health risk that is more common in high-order multiple pregnancies.  Boyle knows full well how stressful it is to parent a large brood, but she maintains that terminating a multiple pregnancy is not a solution.

“You just could not possibly imagine you could love these babies as much as you do,” said Boyle over the phone from her office in East Islip, N.Y.  “You have your hands full with three or four or five babies, but you can not imagine your life without anyone of them.”

Boyle acknowledges that the challenges that face these couples can be overwhelming.  Not only do moms of multiples report a greater incidence of post-partum depression (43% higher than singleton moms, according to the Pediatrics Journal), but the time-consuming nature of rearing so many babies at once frequently strains the relationships they have with their partners.

“For a good year of your life, your husband is going to be more of a co-worker or a friend than an intimate partner,” she warned.

Those who have a high-risk pregnancy are prohibited from having intercourse halfway through their second trimester.  And after the babies are born, you’ll be too exhausted to make time for each other.  Despite these early struggles, Boyle insists that there is nothing quite like the feeling of three sets of feet kicking inside you, or of nurturing a bond between your kids that ordinary siblings can not experience.

Doyle, Shanks and Kirby all agree.  Their kids are incredibly close, they say, and it is a privilege to bear witness to it.

“You can see their personalities emerge much more quickly since you have a point of comparison,” said  Doyle, adding that she was even disappointed that her girls did not engage in the “multiple secret language” she had heard so much about.

Kirby cautions expecting parents of multiples to take it one day at a time, but to have fun with it as well.

“I couldn’t ask for anything more of my life,” she said.  “At the end of the day, it’s the most rewarding thing.”

And fortunately for new moms, she has never seen anyone who couldn’t handle the stress.

Victor Furtick, a nineteen year old from Baychester, N.Y. can attest to the unusually strong camaraderie that exists between multiples.  He and his three identical brothers, better known as the Furtick Quadruplets, grew up in the limelight after their birth made headlines in 1990.

Their mother, Brenda, who did not plan on having any more children after losing her teenager to gang violence, had not undergone any fertility treatment when she discovered she was pregnant with four—a spontaneous pregnancy that stands a one in an eleven million chance of occurring.  Defying such odds proved lucrative for the Furticks, who were frequent guests of Jay Leno and Diane Sawyer as well as commercial stars for Wendy’s and Tide.

Victor remembers him and his brothers being mobbed on the first day of middle school by a crowd of adoring peers.

“It was like we were celebrities,” he recalled.  He and his brothers had a secret language that occasionally drove their parents crazy.  Admittedly, it wasn’t always easy for Victor to forge his own path as one of such a famous foursome, who always shared a classroom with another brother.  Often, all four of them had to dress alike to emphasize their identical appearance.

“I didn’t have a sense of individuality,” he said.

But Victor and his brothers have since stolen glimpses at self-discovery now that they all attend different colleges.  The four brothers talk about three times a week on the phone, and are anxious to reunite this summer.  None of them would have wanted a different childhood.

“I think you have to milk it for all its worth,” he advised.  “You shouldn’t try and separate from each other, because you’re a miracle.  So be proud and accept it.”

The post Baby Multiplicity appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Jamie Locher had a rough time in Teach for America. She taught in a Baltimore high school.

Even in the best of times, college seniors have to arm themselves with parent-ready responses to the stinging question: “What’s next after graduation?”

But for students like Claire Steinbeck, who are hunting for entry-level jobs in a down-market that launched the unemployment rate to 12.5 million in February, the answer does not come easily.

That’s why Steinbeck and thousands of others are crossing their fingers that they can reply, “Teach for America” the next time mom or dad drills them.

Founded in 1990, Teach for America (TFA) is a national organization that recruits graduating seniors to train and work as teachers in underprivileged public schools, while earning a master’s degree in education. With its stated aims to close the achievement gap and end educational inequity, TFA has long been a mainstay for altruistic collegians who have an interest in public service but aren’t quite ready to commit to a career path.

Many view the two-year program as the perfect way to gain work experience before pursuing a business or law degree, and that having it on a resume will strengthen their application for either.

But with dwindling career opportunities and ubiquitous hiring freezes, joining Teach for America’s ranks to close the achievement gap has never been more appealing.

“People are looking for things to buy some time before they look for a real job because they feel like there are no job opportunities out there,” said Steinbeck, explaining why so many of her peers at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., are increasingly interested in post-grad opportunities like TFA.

Applications to the program were up by 42% this year, with about 35,000 candidates vying for less than 4,000 spots.

On paper, and in this recession, it all sounds really good: a guaranteed two-year job, a partly subsidized master’s, and a unique chance to enrich the lives of disadvantaged students. But how many of these TFA-bound graduates will have a gratifying experience trying to turn hopeless dropouts into motivated learners like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds?

Results will vary, according to TFA alums. It could very well be life-changing. It could be a venture you regret. It could be a new vocation or it could be the reason why you never teach again.

They all agree on one thing though: a two-year tenure with Teach for America is very, very hard.

“Emotionally, it’s very draining,” warned Dwayne Bensing, a TFA corps member in his second year of teaching.  “Last year, I felt like I was failing at everything.”

TFA, while elated by the high volume of applicants this year, does not want to give the depressed economy all the credit for the program’s heightened popularity.

“We believe the increase can also be attributed to a growing interest among young people to engage in public service,” reported TFA rep Eva Boster in a recent email, “[and] the reputation we have developed among young people for achieving results with underserved students.”

But not all educators are convinced that Teach for America meets its mission of improving educational inequality. The corps of teachers they assemble may have the enthusiasm, they say, but not the skills or experience to temper the country’s poorest — and often most dangerous — school districts.

“We don’t have Doctors in America,” Stanford University professor Pam Grossman said to The New York Times in 2000. “There are places that are desperate for legal advice; we don’t send bright young graduates into the legal clinics.”

Dr. Aaron Pallas, a sociology and education professor at Columbia University, tends to agree.  While he commends TFA for its work initiative, he is dubious about the longevity of the organization’s impact on education reform.

“A program as small as TFA is relative to the size of the K-12 teaching force in the U.S.,” he said in a phone interview. “There are so many more teaching spots to be served by TFA.”

Pallas gets nervous when people advocate the ambitious non-profit as a long-term solution.  But he still thinks the program does a lot of good.

So does Lesley Young, a first-year graduate student at Tufts University in Boston. Young completed her two-year stint teaching fifth grade in the Mississippi Delta last summer, in a rural “cotton field” of a town that she said was her first choice of placement.

Living in such a tight-knit community offered plenty of opportunity for Young to get involved and know her neighbors, and despite the warnings otherwise, she felt adequately prepared and supported when she entered the classroom for the first time.

“Teach for America is very challenging, but there are a lot of practical skills to be gained and I didn’t realize how valuable they would be going into it,” Young explained over the phone. “I am organized. I have public speaking skills. I can take on a lot, and I wouldn’t have gotten that by spending a year abroad traveling in Europe or working in D.C.”

Kate Baughman, a TFA alum who is now in her fourth year of teaching at a charter school in the Bronx, was also very positive about her experience.

“I really appreciated TFA for its model and mindset,” Baughman said. “There is a lot of blame in education, but they taught me that at the end of the day, your only locus of control is yourself.”

Baughman is the ideal educator, one that Teach For America wants to clone, because her story is so marketable: She’s a driven Vanderbilt graduate who’s passionate about making a difference. Recruited to teach in New York’s needy inner-city school system, she found the day-to-day routine extremely trying but extremely rewarding — a period of great personal growth. And what’s more, she remained in the education field — a fate she shares with 60 percent of TFA alumni, according to Teach For America’s own statistics.

“I would recommend the program,” she concluded.

But TFA’s retention rate is hard to prove, according to Dr. Pallas.

“The only study that I am aware of that does bear on retention and attrition of TFA suggests that after the fifth year, fewer than 20 percent are still in the same school at which they started,” he remarked.

Regardless of the actual number, experts say that TFA corps members who do feel compelled to stay in education after finishing their initial two years become the vanguard of education reform. Anne Martin, a former TFA teacher with an M.A. in Education Policy from Harvard, can vouch for this. But she will be the first to admit that the program has its flaws, especially in regard to its organization. Her first year teaching in San Francisco was marked by plenty of tears and mishaps.  But the best legacy of TFA, according to her, is the network of alumni who survive their tenure wanting to do more.

“You take these college kids who come from privilege and expose them to this side of society and they are outraged,” she said. “Instead of law school or med school, they stay in the education field.”

That is what Martin did. She grew up in Baltimore believing that “public school” was a dirty word, and now works at a charter school in Washington, D.C. The greatest success stories that Teach for America puts forth are the ones with a similar narrative: The alumni who started charter schools of their own or run for political office touting education policy as a campaign goal.

But not everyone’s TFA experience leads to stories like these. Will Healey, a graduate of New York’s Fordham University, was as not as quick as Baughman to endorse the organization’s good will.

“A lot of people who are interested in applying call me up,” he said over the phone. “I give them the full run-through of what it’s like in the trenches. I tell them what Teach for America won’t tell them.”

He tells them, for instance, that you might end up in the Texas Rio Grande Valley instead of New York — your first choice. That you might be at a school with 17 other TFA corps members, not the average four, who are equally as clueless as you are. That you might be teaching English as a Second Language to seventh and eighth graders when you don’t speak any Spanish yourself.

“I had students who conversed with me almost exclusively in Spanish,” Healey said, bewilderment still in his voice.

The TFA administrators are guarded about testimonies like Healey’s, or the telltale account of his classmate, Jamie Locher, who quit her TFA gig at a Baltimore high school after only five months.  Her resignation followed an incident involving another teacher who was so repulsed by Locher’s novice status and method of teaching that he eventually snapped and assaulted her in front of her students. Locher recounted being forced into a headlock by a man twice her size in the hall outside of her classroom.

“I tried to be resilient all year because that’s what Teach for America tells you to be — you have to bend like a willow or make lemonade out of lemons,” she said..

After the attack, Locher sought the guidance of her TFA adviser in an effort to develop a plan of action. The adviser didn’t return her call for a week.

“I didn’t hear from her until after I decided to quit and leave Baltimore,” Locher said. “My cell phone rang as I was pulling in my driveway in Atlanta.”

Teach for America, wary that stories such as Locher’s could potentially hurt their recruitment, has enacted a policy that requires all corps members to sign a contract agreeing to not publish anything negative about their TFA experience while they are fulfilling their two-year commitment.

Dwayne Bensing is about to wrap up his two years of teaching in Philadelphia, P.A. — one of three cities that President Obama red-flagged in a recent address to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce because of its alarming high school drop out rate. Like many of his peers, Bensing’s time in Philly has been up and down — a test of his energy, emotional strength and sense of achievement.

His gripes with TFA are not unreasonable: He wishes that he hadn’t been tapped to teach social studies when he was earning his certification to teach science, and that the TFA Summer Institute training program had set more realistic expectations about lesson planning. Most importantly, he wishes that the advisers had been more encouraging of his choice to tell his students that he is gay.

But the second year of teaching has been much smoother for Bensing, who looks forward to starting law school at The University of Pennsylvania in the fall.

“On the positive side, I think TFA thinks hard about how it can be better,” he commented.  “They take feedback seriously and are always evolving their program.”

This, of course, will be welcome news to the 35,000 hopeful Teach for America applicants this year.

The post Teach for America Yields Mixed Results for Eager Grads appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Thomas Harkins,13, celebrates his win.

With the soundtrack of Rocky V ringing in his ears, Thomas Harkins became the hero of New York City’s Hunter College High School yesterday.  Confident, charismatic, and characteristically tow-headed, he wore the part well, posing for the flashing cameras while brandishing his heavy trophy in the air.

Though Harkins is a high school champ, he is not a high school student. Harkins, 13, is the winner of the New York City 45th Annual Spelling Bee.

“It feels awesome; I can’t describe it,” said a beaming Harkins shortly after correctly spelling the word “philippic” to take first place in today’s competition.  Harkins is an 8th grader at Dyker Heights Intermediate School 201 in Brooklyn. He was one of 44 finalists contending for a chance to participate in the Scripps National Spelling Bee held in Washington, D.C. in May.  Tuesday’s winner will also earn this right, along with other prizes such as a laptop and theatre tickets.

Harkin’s formula for success was easy.  “I studied a lot of words, and I listened to the songs of Rocky V,” said Harkins.  Pumping his fists in the air to express his excitement, he chewed gum as he spoke.  “I really paid attention to the lyrics of “Go for It.  And look where it got me? The Big D.C.!”

The idea of passing your free time memorizing Latin roots and making vocabulary flash cards in bulk may not appeal to most middle school students, but for a privileged few, spelling bee competitions form an early milestone in their academic career.

It certainly is in Harkin’s case.   His mother, Linda, insisted that her son’s desire to win the regional bee was fueled by his own appetite.

“He reads all the time,” she said.  “He was spelling words with magnets while sitting in his high chair.”

Harkins said that his friends, who applauded thunderously every time he approached the microphone, were really pulling for him to win.  They did not mock his choice for taking the bee seriously even if they didn’t.

The benefit of spelling bee competitions, according to Ted Solow, a retired high school principal who has been a judge at the N.Y.C Bee for the past seven years, is that it distinguishes a subset of bookworm adolescents who would not otherwise have a chance to enjoy the limelight.

“Kids get to be recognized for a talent they have the same as any athlete would be recognized,” Solow said.  “They are the best and the brightest of the city.”

Parents Kevin and Laura Dumbach, whose son Thomas finished third in the spelling contest, shared this opinion as well.

“It gives kids confidence,” Laura Dumbach commented.  “They get to form new friendships,” adding that there is a lot of bonding going on at these tournaments.

There is often a lot of ill-will too, from parents who doubt the integrity of the judges or the speaker’s pronunciation of a word.   Audience members contested a judge’s ruling twice this morning, but this is expected, according to Solow.

Solow was pleased that this year’s competition ran so smoothly—and so quickly.

“Two years ago, we were still here three hours in,” he recalled.  “Neither kid could lose.”

After a brief 55 minutes this year, however, there was only one clear winner.

Harkins grinned.  “ I don’t even know what philippic means.”Brooklyn Middle School Student is NYC Spelling Bee Cham

The post Brooklyn student is spelling bee champ appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

When it comes to engagements, diamonds like this one are still a girl's best friend.

“Let the diamond find you.”

Sipping mimosas beneath an arrestive chandelier in the Harry Winston private suite, one floor above the storied flagship salon on Fifth Avenue, a dozen glittering women and a handful of apprehensive men did not have trouble heeding gemologist Tom Burstein’s request: they could find the diamonds quite easily.

Perched in an open vault that once secured the Hope Diamond, these exorbitantly priced engagement rings held their own at the Harry Winston Bridal Seminar one Saturday morning in early February.

Burstein, vice president of the New York store and keynote speaker at the seminar, described Winston’s legacy and the women he bejeweled, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Jackie Onassis. But it was almost possible to forget that the U.S. economy is experiencing the worst decline since the Great Depression.

At a time when the world’s largest banks are folding and the unemployment rate is climbing to new heights, who’s shopping for engagement rings that cost as much as $15,000?
Plenty of people, according to Harry Winston representatives.

“Every month is bridal month,” quipped Burstein. And while he admitted “the diamond market has softened,” the Harry Winston diamonds are still in demand.

Since December, the luxury jeweler has hosted three bridal seminars, and this February event was particularly well attended.

“They are educational,” explained Katherine Kane, director of marketing, as two waiters circulated flutes of champagne and crisp linen napkins to guests.

Dan Svejanar came to the event on his own, dressed in jeans and ready to be informed about carats and clarity, cuts and color.

“My girlfriend thinks I am at the office,” he laughed. While Svejanar didn’t precisely know when he would pop the question, he wanted to be equipped with the perfect rock.

Asked if the economy has affected his plans of proposal, Svejanar shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m not in a rush [to propose],” he said.

Despite the deep economic impact on retail and restaurants, the wedding industry is not experiencing major setbacks. Tracey Goldstein, owner of New York’s event planning firm Polka Dot Events, has not seen a decline in wedding clients since she opened her company in 2007. On the contrary, Goldstein claims that it is currently a “buyer’s market” for brides and grooms who are trying to negotiate reasonable deals with vendors who, fearful of being without business, are now more willing to take on smaller jobs.

“Your wedding is one day; it’s not a matter of going to the grocery store and not buying organic because it’s too expensive,” Goldstein explained, adding that the people who are getting engaged right now are not the ones impacted by the declining economy.

“The guy who just got fired from Lehman Brothers is not proposing right now,” said Goldstein.

Nicky Reinhard of David Reinhard Events shared a similar sentiment in her description of the wedding industry of late.

“It’s not a science,” she said. “The reality is, people are always going to get married.”

Reinhard acknowledged that people are still calling her company to inquire about services and said she wouldn’t be surprised if the “million-plus weddings” were still being thrown. Still, that doesn’t mean that brides-to-be are not looking to be more conscious of how they are spending their money. Some are shrinking their guest lists, according to Reinhard; others may be cutting back on the flowers.

“People don’t want to give the appearance of spending superficially,” said Reinhard.

Is the wedding industry recession-proof? The business of throwing a wedding is rarely an inexpensive affair, and despite shaky financial times that warrant a government bailout plan of $798 billion, experts predict that florists and pastry chefs don’t have to start panicking yet.

“People are still planning weddings, but they are adjusting to what they can spend and what’s appropriate to spend.” Reinhard said. “They aren’t losing sight of what it is: It’s about family and great friends and what it takes to make that kind of thing.”

Elizabeth John, 28, will be a New York bride next June. She was thrilled when her long-term boyfriend, Eric, proposed to her during a stroll along the river in view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Eric works in the operations department at Goldman Sachs, so the couple is acutely aware of the waning economy.

“It feels funny to be planning a wedding now,” John said in a phone interview. “Why are we spending so much money?”

In the early stages of planning, John used to toy with the idea of hosting two different events — a traditional American wedding in addition to a Chinese banquet to honor Eric’s Chinese heritage. It didn’t take long to discover how costly it would be to execute that plan.

“That got nixed very quickly,” John said.

Catherine Smith can empathize with having to restructure a wedding budget. The 30-year-old associate at Burson-Marsteller PR firm was completely caught off-guard when her boyfriend, Matt, popped the question while the two were out to dinner on the Upper East Side shortly after Thanksgiving.

She was ecstatic. But the initial excitement soon gave way to stress as Smith had to negotiate ways of cutting back on expenses.

“My dad is semi-retired, and he got burned in the market,” Smith said. “There was money set aside for my wedding that just isn’t there anymore.”

Smith described the frustration of finding talented photographers and musicians at reasonable prices.

“I love the photographer at my friend’s wedding, but after only a year and a half, he’s doubled the prices and then some.”

Smith sighed. “I wanted to tell him, ‘Read the paper! Watch the news! How can you be charging people this much?’”

If every month is bridal month as the Harry Winston connoisseurs suggested, then it must not be hard to do.

The post Who is chasing Harry Winston? appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Not telling a sexual partner you have HIV could land you jail

When Peter Ayala set his girlfriend’s car aflame last year, he was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison in his native Ohio.  But this past November, the 45 year old was charged with another crime that earned him an additional five years behind bars.  Ayala committed the same error that sent Brooklyn teenager Nushawn Williams to jail over a decade ago.  Both men made a choice of omission that more and more U.S. states now consider to be a felony: they neglected to tell their partners that they had tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

HIV legislation is not a new trend in the U.S., and many states legally require that health care providers report the names of HIV-positive patients to their respective health departments.  In New York, the HIV Reporting Law was passed in June of 2000, and the premise behind it, according to Daniel O’Connell, deputy director of the New York Department of Health’s AIDS Institute, is to provide the necessary data to control an international contagion that has already claimed the lives of more than 545,000 Americans since 1981.

“For years, we were working with an older picture of the epidemic,” O’Connell said in a phone interview this week.  “HIV reporting has provided the department with ongoing information about where the epidemic is, including information about new diseases.”

O’Connell added that New York’s position on HIV Reporting is not “anomalous.”

“The whole country is moving towards this,” he explained.  “We were not the first.”

What New York public health law is not moving towards (though it has been proposed, according to O’Connell) is the criminalization of HIV transmission, an act that would deem reckless or intentional HIV transmission a crime.  According to the latest Kaiser State Health report, such statutes exist in 32 states, including Ohio, where Peter Ayala was convicted.  His failure to inform his girlfriend that he was HIV-positive, despite being sexually active with her, was a violation of the Buckeye State’s “House Bill 686.” This relatively unknown law, as described by Bill Tiedemann, administrator of the Ohio Department of Health’s HIV/STD Prevention Program, prohibits Ohio residents from knowingly having sex or sharing a needle with a partner without first disclosing an HIV positive status.

“We educate folks about [House Bill 686] because they need to be able to discuss it,” said Tiedemann.  “They need to get assistance with it because they could end up in a court case.”

Criminal statutes on HIV transmission are part of the state governments’ wider effort to combat the spread of AIDS, a disease that still remains incurable and still continues to infect new people every day.  But these laws are strongly contested by advocacy agencies and AIDS coalition groups, who are fearful of fostering stigma and further discriminating against an already hurting community.

“It is an emotional knee-jerk reaction by the government,” said Kevin Sullivan, Executive Director of the Ohio AIDS Coalition in Columbus, OH, of his state’s criminal sanctioning of HIV transmission.  “These cases of criminal prosecution are not based on proof but on the emotions that surround a person with HIV.”

While Sullivan acknowledged that the law is rarely applied in Ohio, he said that the existence of it stimulates a culture of emotional unease for people living with the virus.  What’s more, he added, is that the onus of protection lies exclusively with the HIV-positive individual rather than as a mutually-shared choice between two partners.

“It gives a false sense of security for people who are not HIV positive,” Sullivan said.  “They don’t think they have to be concerned because the law will protect them, but it doesn’t.”

And as for those who are infected with the virus, Sullivan said that the law makes them feel as if “…they’re being watched.”

Perhaps the strongest argument against HIV criminalization statutes is the theory that these laws discourage people from seeking out their HIV status.  If the law only prosecutes those who are HIV positive, opponents maintain that at-risk people will no longer be willing to get tested.  Sullivan asserted this when he complained that House Bill 686 drove people “underground” at a time when AIDS awareness groups are already struggling to provide care for patients in need.  Bill Tiedemann expressed a similar sentiment.

“It’s not an effective law, because if you knew about it, you wouldn’t get tested.”  Kate Shumate, Tiedemann’s colleague and a director of Ohio Department of Health’s HIV care services, summarized Peter Ayala’s case as a “giant hiccup” and speculated whether or not his recent conviction would deter others from getting tested themselves.

O’Connell maintains that New York’s HIV laws do not negatively impact the number of people who get tested for HIV, highlighting that 2 million New Yorkers were tested last year.

Sullivan was quick to point out that the Ohio AIDS Coalition does not invest significant energy fighting the HIV criminal laws because they have been enforced primarily against people who have behaved in an “outrageously negligent” manner.  Anthony Whitfield of Lacy, Washington, is one such example: he was sentenced to life in prison in 2004 after his exploits exposed 170 people to the virus.  What prompted Ohio’s legislation, according to Sullivan, was the media frenzy that surrounded the 1999 conviction of  Williams in upstate New York.

Williams caused an uproar in the usually quiet community of Chautauqua County, N.Y. when 13 local women tested positive for HIV after having slept with him.  Some were teenagers; the youngest was 13 years old.  When Chautauqua and New York City Health Department officials finally managed to track Williams down, he admitted to having close to 80 different sex partners—some local to the city and some from upstate—many of whom could have been exposed to the AIDS virus.  Williams slept with some of his partners before he learned of his HIV status.  But he also had unprotected sex with several women after he knew he had HIV, including six of the 13 young women from the rural towns of Chautauqua County whom he infected.  The Brooklyn teen, whose checkered police record included drug dealing and robbery, was not tried under an HIV criminalization statute because none exist in New York.  However, he was charged with reckless endangerment stemming from drug use and having sex with a minor.

The Chautauqua County AIDS outbreak quickly emerged in the press as a sensational and scandalous story with Williams cast as the villain.  Newspaper headlines screamed “Lethal Lothario” and “One Man HIV Spree.” At the time of Williams’s arrest, N.Y. Mayor Ruldolph Giuliani announced that ”There’s no question he should be prosecuted for attempted murder, or worse.”

Catherine Hanssens, the executive director of the Center for HIV Law and Policy in New York City, recalled the frantic outrage and the subsequent hysteric news coverage that stirred the HIV community during the Williams case.

“They grossly mishandled it,” Hanssens said of the media during a phone call made from her office on Broadway this week.  “They all talked about him as this man, but he was a kid; he was 19.”  And while everyone was up in arms about the girls who were given the AIDS virus, Hanssens said she did not remember anyone asking Williams, who is black, how he got infected.

Hanssens also reproached the Chautauqua County health officials who, she claimed, distributed flyers with Williams’s picture above a caption that read ‘If you slept with this man, you’re at risk’ to local high schools.

“They should have been saying, ‘If you’re having unprotected sex, you’re at risk,’ said Hanssens.  “To suggest that white girls sleeping with black men causes AIDS is extraordinarily destructive and does not encourage responsible behavior.”

Neal Rzepkowski, a physician who serves at various rural HIV clinics in Western N.Y. State, still treats several of the women whom Williams infected over ten years ago.  Driving to work this week, Rzepkowski said over the phone that all the women “were doing great,” and that several of them were married with healthy babies.  He felt that Chautauqua County, a small region, handled a major health problem as best as they could.  But he agrees with Hanssens that the media made the Brooklyn teen out to be a monster.

“Some of the girls told me that Williams would use a condom if they asked, but they didn’t always ask him,” Rzepkowski said.  This included the 13-year-old whose sexual activity with Williams led to his statutory rape charge.

“I know her, and I still treat her, and she was not a virgin.  She had sex with six other partners before Williams,” said Rzepkowski.
And while Williams should not have had unprotected sex, Rzepkowski believes that it was because he was in denial of his HIV status, not because he was cruelly attempting to infect partners with a disease.

“People who transmit HIV don’t go doing so on purpose,” he said.

Regardless of Williams’s intentions, his story launched a wave of new HIV legislation among U.S. states that criminalized HIV transmission and called for mandatory reporting of HIV-positive individuals.  New York’s Reporting and Partner Notifcation Law was enacted less than two years after Williams plead guilty to exposing women to HIV. Under this legislation, New York physicians are bound by law to report the names of persons who test positive for HIV as well as to share with them their options for notifying their partners.  Whether an HIV infect person chooses to notify his or her partners is not required.  According to N.Y. Health Department experts like O’Connell, Partner Notification provides important benefits in controlling the epidemic and helps alert people to a serious health risk.
“We have to be able to track the disease,” O’Connell said.

Many in the medical field also support New York’s Reporting and Partner Notification laws.  Rzepkowski is one of them, as is Dr. Robert Wasnick, an internal medicine physician who works at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich, Conn.  Wasnick described the efficiency of the nurse practitioners who oversaw HIV testing at New York’s St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he completed his residency.

“For us as doctors, we wish that people knew they had diseases when they do to empower them to prevent its spread,” Wasnick said.  “A person with HIV has an obligation to tell their partner, and that person has a right to know.”

But there are plenty of others, like Catherine Hanssens, who think the current HIV laws are useless in preventing the spread of AIDS.

“To legislate anything that relates to sex is disastrous,” she said.  “HIV laws have no impact on risk behavior any more than prohibition had on people’s desire to drink.”

Rather than coerce people to notify their partners, which Hanssens claims is a consequence of many state Partner Notification laws, she would rather the government work to develop a positive relationship with public health.  Institutionalizing condom use would promote that, she said, as would the decriminalization of clean syringe exchange programs since a third of all HIV transmission cases are related to IV drug use.  But HIV criminalization statutes, according to Hanssens, are entirely unproductive.

“Criminalization laws is the government saying that people with HIV are so toxic that we need laws to stop them.”  And though she recognizes that there are psychopaths in every imaginable social situation—including HIV transmission – she believes that they have nothing to do with the epidemic.

And however well-intentioned they are, Hanssens is adamant that HIV crime laws are ineffective.

“Getting people to have the right goals is never the issue,” she said, equating futile HIV prevention strategies to people who still smoke or overeat despite knowledge of the consequences.

“I see obese people in our cafeteria eating themselves to death, and I don’t think it’s a product of them not knowing that cheeseburgers are bad for you.  You can’t turn goals into reality or behavior. That has always been the challenge of HIV prevention.”

This week in The New York Post, a story was published about a man from Queens who falsified his AIDS test so that his girlfriend would have unprotected sex with him.  Duane Lang, who has been HIV positive since 2003, may become the second man in N.Y. to be sent to prison for reckless endangerment on account of knowingly exposing a partner to the HIV virus.  It is unlikely that criminalization of HIV transmission statutes will be repealed anytime soon.LL

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