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Exploiting baby
That bundle of joy can also be a bundle of money.
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Author Teresa Strasser
From baby-sitters to college funds, we've talked a lot this hour about the ways your kid is going to cost you. But writer Teresa Strasser decided to use her pregnancy and new role as mommy to actually make some money. And take advantage of strangers willingness to be a little nicer. She chronicles these adventures in a memoir called "Exploiting My Baby: Because It's Exploiting Me."
"I think there something lovable and fragile and vulnerable about somebody who's pregnant and it's just an instinct," Strasser said.
She put this idea to a test while doing a spot for her new show "The List." She went to a mall and convinced a man to give her his sandwich, had several people hold her hair up and fan and the back of her neck -- and one couple even removed her shoes and massage her feet.
Those weren't the only perks of pregnancy for Strasser. She said she got more opportunities to work as a pregnant woman. She reported more for "Dr. Phil" and ABC bought her book about her pregnancy to make it into a TV pilot. Strasser points out that there are other moms "exploiting" their babies -- Elisabeth Hasselbeck of "The View," Kelly Ripa of "Regis and Kelly" and Kathie Lee Gifford.
"You are going to be a mom, you are going to be marketable!" She assured soon-to-be-mom and interim Money host Adriene Hill.
T is talking about jobs in ENTERTAINMENT. Specifically TV hosting jobs. Where America loves MOMs. As far as the 'exploitation' thing: she explained that. She likes irony. She's amusing. And if you heard her on the radio pre-marriage and babies, you would probably get it more how she's evolved. Frankly, babies bore me but she does not and you people are really stuffy.
Ms. Strasser's bitterness at not being hired at "the View" because she wasn't pregnant is ironic, as she's now using her pregnancy in the "exploitation" of her child. At the end of the interview she says she has less time for her "BS'" (as she puts it), but clearly she does, and we had to listen to it. There was nothing in this interview that was interesting or informative to new moms or dads concerned about the financial toll of having a child. Marketplace has met a new low in broadcast journalism.
It was hilarious that you humoured this egotistical nightmare of a mother. Then it stopped being hilarious when Ms. Hill started buying into Strasser's fantasy message of improved job prospects post-childbirth.
Marketplace has run countless stories of the dangers motherhood poses to one's career, and while it's nice to run something with a different message from time to time, there has to be a reason why all those past stories ran. Why not challenge Strasser's counterfactual assertions, Marketplace? How little value do you place on your own past journalism to allow one non-expert to contradict them, without evidence and without challenge?
