Monday, March 03, 2025
6 Artists on Family-Planning While Navigating Their Careers
Dance Magazine: The demands of a dance career can make family planning especially difficult. Dancers’ bodies are literally their jobs; dance schedules and finances can be inconsistent. In the U.S., the recent wave of abortion bans and restrictions, and the possibility of more constraints on reproductive health services like birth control or in vitro fertilization, have further complicated these decisions. Some queer and trans people are wondering if their legal rights to form families could be in jeopardy.
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2 comments:
Family planning as an artist is such an interesting topic to think about because in this economy, raising a child is EXPENSIVE. Even on a two person income, things are pricey and as an artist, this affects basically everything. Especially in dance where your body is your job and without a functioning body, you are out of a job, family planning is pretty important. It is really cool to be able to hear these stories from these six families because all of their stories are so different. I feel like the entertainment industry as a whole does not really allow for children and families because everything is so gig based and we do basically everything at night, it’s really hard to plan around spontaneity and to not have a stable schedule. Overall, this was a super interesting article and something that I had not really thought about prior to reading this article.
This article is not at all what I was expecting when I read this title. I went to a session at USITT that was about finding a way to balance having a family and working in the entertainment field as having both can be incredibly challenging. That is the type of discussion that I expected from this article. However, I like the turn it took. It has been a while since I have stopped to think about what it is like to become pregnant as a performer and especially as a dancer. Being a dancer requires certain physical demands and a type of look that does not necessarily line up with pregnancy. And I have heard the stigma of needing to wait until later to get as far in your career as possible before “ruining your body”. I think conversations about challenges like these are happening more often and are more widely accepted and I think we need to do it more often so people feel less alone.
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