Live Q&As

Your article does not explain "why." Why does the Supreme Court need more moms? What is the nexus between a "good" Supreme Court justice and being a mom? You make points about tricky balancing and life outside work, etc. But we all know that. What does it have to do with the Supreme Court? The article sounds like affirmative action for moms because they are supposedly "penalized" in the workplace (when in fact they may simply have less time/attention to devote to demanding jobs than dads/non-parents).

How many of the sitting justices are dads?

I think that putting a MOM on the Supreme Court would be a threat to the hardcore feminists whose #1 goal is to protect abortion at all costs. Could this be a true thought?

Your essay is based on some very invidious assumptions: 1. All women want children. 2. All the women who have children experience primarily joy and other positive emotions. This is not true -- many women have children because of social pressure, and experience primarily regret, grief and a number of other negative emotions. This is carrying identity politics to the point of absurdity. Instead of excellence, we need judges representing every possible identity group -- disabled, overweight, mixed-race, immigrant, evangelical, fathers, single parents, widows, the list is endless.

I'm all for moms' rights and recognition of the work most mothers do. But the idea that somehow the lack of mothers on the SC means much is goofy at best -- the type of mom who could make it to the SC these days is not an average mom. Yes, she'll raise kids and love them, but she won't face the same problems that an average mother will face. She won't have to deal with workplaces that actively dissuade people from taking a little time off to help a sick child, she'd likely have a lot of class privilege that allows her to do things that regular moms can't, and like you even point out in your article, she's most likely going to have a "high achieving" husband who can help out financially in ways that most normal moms' husbands (if they have them) can't. The upper-class mother that you pine for would bring little to nothing special to the Court. She'd be just the same as everyone else on the court: Ivy-educated, upper-income, earning more than 80 percent or more of the rest of the country. The kind of people who makes it to the SC these days, mother or not, woman or not, are equally disconnected from the lives of the majority of people in the United States. That's not necessarily a deal-breaker or inherently bad, but stop pretending that all forms of motherhood across class, education levels, and income level are created equal. They're not.

Hello, in theory, I like your thought about having more moms on the Supreme Court. But, as single woman myself, I notice how children truly distract working women. That sounds harsh but unless you have a partner (man or woman) who is willing to pick up the slack, job performance goes down. This is a job that certainly requires top-notch focused, performance. This may be a situation where you can't do it all....mother and SC justice. I'm fine with Kagan being single and childless. I feel like she'd be 100 percent committed all the time. Thanks.

As a single, never-married professional woman of 58, now you want to sling ANOTHER barrier at my career goals because I'm not a mother? Earth to Ann: some of us would have liked to be married but never found the right guy. This is another appalling attack at single women who have to slog through life without a spouse to help us emotionally and professionally, pick us up when we're down and pay the mortgage when we're unemployed. (And pay marrieds' share of taxes -- no extra deductions for us). This is an appalling attack at a very qualified woman for the Supreme Court.

To be blunt, while I appreciate the need to have people with diverse experiences on the Court, as a single woman lawyer (and -- for the record -- I am "childless" in the sense that I am not a biological mother but I do have a niece and godson whom I love, and I spend much time with other friends' children), I found it incredibly insulting to suggest that just because someone is childless, they cannot empathize with the concerns of parents. Many "childless" people, such as myself, care about these issues too from a broader societal perspective. (For example, I have spent time working on women's and family policy issues prior to becoming a lawyer (family economic security, daycare, pre-k schooling, etc.)) To suggest that just because someone does not have children, unlike yourself, they will not care about these issues is both wrong and incredibly self-righteous.

As far as I am concerned the Supreme Court, as it is made up, has NO ONE who shares my background whether they be Female, Mother, or Male. I am a white male, former Army officer, engineer in manufacturing for three decades, married for over 43 years, 3 kids, 4 grandkids, sports nut who takes care of his 91-year-old mother. No one on the Supreme Court comes close to my life experiences. They are all lawyers with very limited total life experiences. The latest two women nominated are not married and do not have children. None of the Justices have ever served in the military. None of these folks have ever run a manufacturing business. I do not believe that any of them are as close to their elderly mother as I am. I do not feel comfortable that ANY of these lawyers can do the job. We have a disgraceful system that selects our Supreme Court from a very narrow group of unqualified candidates (by their personal life experiences). I say again DISGRACEFUL! What can be done about this?

How about a mom with at least two kids? We practice judicial settlement of disputes 24/7.

Okay, being a mom is a good thing but should there be more mama grizzlies on the Supreme Court ?

Thanks for citing the statistics regarding discrimination against mothers in the workplace. In commenting about the need for more moms on the Supreme Court, some made sarcastic observations such as that the Court needs more pet owners, thus comparing having a child to owning a pet. Wouldn't you say that the disdain for parenting that is inherent in that type of comment serves as confirmation that we do need more mothers on the Court? (I am a loving and indulgent pet owner, by the way, but would definitely never compare the two situations.)

I am not anti-feminist. I am a partnered gay man, and though I am no lawyer and lack the qualifications to be a Justice, what about the experiences of those of us who have no children, who live outside the traditional "norms" of family. I respect Justices O'Connor and Ginsburg, but they are no more or less valid or compassionate. I've known some pretty lousy parents, and some childless couples who are extremely compassionate and understanding of everyone they encounter. Why do you take such a middle-class heterosexist point of view in your approach to what shouldn't even be a question. And by the way, I'm all for more female justices on the Court. I wish there were four or five or six. And some people with nontraditional lifestyles. I'd say Justice Souter was pretty compassionate, wouldn't you?

While I understand your point about diversity, I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of motherhood as a factor for two reasons. First, it wrongly drags into the public arena what is arguably the most personal decision an individual can make, which is whether to become a parent. Is it reasonable to want that part of a nominee's life to be left out of the debate? Second. It wasn't so long ago that women who didn't want children were regarded by society as strange or even mentally ill, and many people still believe that a woman isn't "complete" or "fulfilled" if she isn't a mother.

In writing the article, did you have a sense of how many judges are mothers? Obviously, that impacts the candidate pool for a position as prestigious as the Supreme Court.

The Court is a unit of nine people, so there are always going to be some groups without "representation." To take another widely reported example, if Kagan succeeds Stevens there will be no Protestants on the Court. So I think this is not really an issue about the Supreme Court and more an issue about the profession of the law, and about the factors that erect the "motherhood wall" you cite. I'm interested to know how the motherhood wall in law compares with the wall elsewhere -- say, college presidents or hospital chiefs-of-staff or newspaper editors-in-chief. Even within politics, we see plenty of mothers in the executive and judicial branches.

With only nine members, how "representative' can Supreme Court judges be of the overall population? In asking for "mom" representation, I ask you: does the one black member "represent" African-American opinion? Ma Barker was a "mom" and she would represent few mothers.

Ms. Palin and Sec Clinton are both moms , but I fail to see how their common experience would result in many common beliefs. Is not the overwhelming factor in who is fit to be on the court their legal knowledge and how they are likely to apply it?

Yes, it was my first thought when Obama nominated Kagan "it's like Sotomayor, she gave up a family for a career!" Why can't we find more Pelosis that give us women some hope that even if we battle diapers and midnight stomach flu we can make it professionally. I know firsthand that 24 hours in a day do not allow moms to do it all. Professions do suffer from motherhood if we want to do a fairly good job being moms. I worked part-time for 10 years, even Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton made sacrifices for some years -- both put themselves on the back burners for their husbands' careers. But did two nominees back-to-back have to be women with no family? Again from personal experience, the worst bosses for women that I can recall are women who feel cheated because they chose not to have families for their careers' sake. I definitely hope this is not the case. I am an ardent Obama supporter and glad that he has two relatively young women chosen, but just wish that one of them could relate to my sleepness nights, maternal anxieties, and how I spent years feeling that I had I foot on 1 escalator and 1 on another with both moving at different paces. Perhaps finding a mom with no potential for nannygate is another impossibility. Does it rule out all of us women who come from humble backgrounds toward ever getting one of these jobs that needs confirmation just because at some point in our lives we were so poor that we may have used helps with questionable immigration status? And of course only mommies are at greater risk of having used these services.