“Now I have instructed, in consultation with clergy of the country, that the law be revised and any article that is not in keeping with the Afghan constitution and Islamic Sharia must be removed from this law,” Karzai said.

Juan Cole:

The government’s pledge to amend the law so as to forbid marital rape misses the point. Afghanistan has a civil code on personal status, and all citizens should be under it.

I’d put this piece away in the circular file.

First, the story – like so many others – somehow assumes that either women procreate on their own or  make all the decisions about childbearing in their relationships. One would glean from the Journal piece that men are apparently absent from these major life decisions. They are never actually mentioned by name in the story, so we can only assume that men never choose to delay building a family for their careers. They want to start popping out dozens of kids from the get-go, it seems, but career-obsessed women stand in the way.

I’m sure you know lots of people in relationships just like that.

From the Journal:

For the first time since government records have been kept, the average age at which women have their first babies posted a decline — according to newly released data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Mothers’ mean age at their first childbirth fell to 25.0 years in 2006, the most recent figures available, from 25.2 in 2005. Women ages 20 to 24 led the shift, with a 5% increase in the rate of first births.

A one-year reversal doesn’t make a trend, of course. But the study lends weight to anecdotal evidence that young women are tuning in more closely to their biological clocks. “It’s the first time it’s ever gone down, and certainly that’s noteworthy,” says Brady Hamilton, co-author of the study.

There’s that anecdotal evidence again. The story notes, correctly, that a one-year reversal doesn’t make a trend, then writes a trend story about it anyway. Here’s more of the “evidence”:

Other factors are at work too, including rising numbers of Hispanics, who tend to start families sooner, says Steven Martin, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. A 4% rise in the rate of first births to older teens, ages 15 to 19, is also playing a role. And the sheer size of the baby boomlet generation, now entering the child-bearing years, may be skewing new mothers’ mean age lower.

So basically, we don’t know what the decrease really means. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, in general, I don’t find a slight rise in older teens having children any kind of positive trend – although I guess you could say those young women certainly aren’t putting their careers first!

Never letting the facts get in the way of a good story, the Journal goes on to cite experts who say the numbers – even if we don’t know what they mean – really do show a new trend, and then pulls out a few examples of younger women saying they didn’t want to put off having kids for their careers.

Their husbands and boyfriends are never interviewed or quoted talking about their preferences, or whether the entire trend of women delaying childbirth for their careers had anything to do with men choosing to delay starting a family in favor of their careers.

Women may face pay inequalities and other discrimination, but apparently they rule the roost in all things having to do with childbirth and careers, and men are mere bystanders. And when it comes to the Journal, even if we’re not really sure what women are doing and why, we’re going to follow the time-honored journalistic tradition of fake trend stories about women and work and just say what we’d like to believe — and then hope that someday, maybe, it comes true.

The loss of the birth control provision came as a blow to Planned Parenthood, which had lobbied forcefully for it.

Despite the news, as I reported today, there is still plenty of reason for the feminist lobby to be pleased — billions and billions of them, in fact.

The bill allocates billions of dollars for education, health care, direct aid to needy families and support for state governments to maintain social programs — all items on the feminist wish list. Stimulus money will create or preserve jobs for teachers, librarians, nurses, and childcare workers around the country.

The outcome of the House bill contrast with feminist fears from just a few weeks ago, when it seemed that stimulus job creation would be confined to the male-dominated construction and energy industries. But the bill allocates only five percent of the stimulus for infrastructure, according to The Boston Globe, a figure that shrank progressively as the details of the stimulus were hashed out:

“Priorities changed,” [Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.)] said. “Someone says, ‘How about food stamps, how about early childhood education?’”

We also haven’t seen the last of the Medicaid family planning expansion. The Senate is expected to take up a stand alone version of the family planning expansion next week.

Gov. Sarah Palin (WDCpix)

No question, Sarah Palin is a trip. We have all been watching her and arguing about her since she appeared on the national scene. For women she is an absolute lightning rod.

Some are much taken with her, identifying with her folksiness and her feistiness and her self-confidence (that thing women are always worrying they don’t have enough of) — her winking feminine swagger. They see her as the real deal, a refreshing new kind of female with power.

But other women, those who have worked hard to grasp the details and minutiae of complicated issues, be they economic or political or whatever, are bothered, even offended, by the charming upstart now in line to be vice president of the United States.

No question, Palin stands on a kind of class fault line when it comes to women. I get that it works for some, the anti-elitist angle, the “darns” and “goshes,” the “I’m just a small town gal,” mantra she hits over and over. There is something both preternaturally girlish about her and very, very tough — a post-feminist hybrid, the hockey mom-turned-frontier state governor.

What she represents finally is a turning of the dial, the torch being passed to a new generation of women. This is a new version, a new model of ascendant female pol — a God-fearing, country-loving mother of five who stresses not her wide-ranging knowledge of the economy or the world and its myriad problems. Quite the contrary.

Let Joe Biden and company talk about Hamas and Saakashvili all they want. Let them flaunt the details of their knowledge. I, Sarah Palin, bring something else, America, something you all out there have, too — a good, solid sense of right and wrong, of the bright, shiny promise that is and will always be America. No need to get bogged down in details — that’s the game of the over-educated elites, the pointy-headed intellectuals. Make no mistake, Palin telegraphs with every down-home verbal tick, that’s not me.

This is a woman running on her common sense. That’s what she brings to the table. That’s the message she flashes to her sisters out there. We know what matters; we know what’s important. We’re the real capable ones, we moms—hockey or otherwise. We are the multi-taskers; we can diaper and run the PTA and, gosh darn, it isn’t really a big leap from there to the White House, now is it? That’s her winking subliminal text, hidden in everything she says. Time for the country to have a mom near — or at — the helm.

For women of an earlier generation, the second-wave feminist, baby-boom generation that fought so hard to compete with men and be taken seriously at the highest levels, there is something astonishing about watching someone run for the highest office by underscoring her familial and maternal skills.

That would have been unthinkable, certainly, for a Hillary Rodham Clinton, who out-policy-wonked the boys. Clinton studied harder, fought harder, talked harder — with more articulateness and range than most of her Washington colleagues. She was intense, driven, did her homework and certainly didn’t go around advertising her family skills. She was all about political skills. It must be hard for her, irritating, to say the least, watching this upstart gal make the rounds.

Palin is also unabashedly feminine and a tad flirty — certainly with the camera, pert and perky. “Can I call you Joe?” she asked to Biden out of the box—a bit of one-upping familiarity. Oh yes, this is, underneath the feminine, a fierce competitor—the testament given by those who have crossed her in Alaska and felt her ire.

But the notion of being unabashedly feminine, twinkly — that, too, for women pols — is something rare to say the least. The Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has a bit of girlishness herself, but her usual performance is more decorous, careful, and coated in pol-speak, than anything from Palin.

How she ultimately plays out, we don’t know. More than half of those polled don’t think she’s ready to be vice president, or, certainly, president. Her candidate is sliding and she will go with him.

We are at a time — perilous economic time — when answers are more of the essence than presence. In the debate Thursday, Palin navigated around tough questions she didn’t want to answer or didn’t know the answers to, mortgages and bankruptcy for example.

But for now, Palin is still up and running. And it is Hillary Clinton who, after a lifetime of mastering the intricacies of public life, is on the campaign sidelines.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”