"Brianna Hill, 28, was taking part one of the two-part test on Oct. 5 when her water broke. The test was administered remotely this year amid the novel coronavirus pandemic... 'I started the second section and 15 to 20 minutes in, I started having contractions,' Hill said. 'I had already asked for an accommodation to get up and go to the bathroom because I was 38 weeks pregnant and they said I'd get flagged for cheating. I couldn't leave the view of the camera. I was determined,' Hill added as to why she didn't stop the exam after showing signs of labor.... After Hill finished day one of the exam, she and her husband, Cameron Andrew, eventually left for West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, Illinois.
A few hours later, Hill and Andrew's first child, a boy named Cassius Phillip Andrew, arrived, weighing 6 pounds, 5 ounces. Meanwhile, Hill was still scheduled to finish part two of the Bar the following day, on Oct. 6.
Hill said her midwife and hospital staff reserved a private room for her on the labor and delivery floor so she could complete the exam.... 'The whole time my husband and I were talking about how I wanted to finish the test and my midwife and nurses were on board. There just wasn’t another option in my mind.... I took the rest of the test in there and was even able to nurse the baby in between sessions! Obviously, I really hope I passed but I’m mostly just proud that I pushed through and finished.'"
This is what women do. It's nice to get a news story as if this is way off the norm, but I believe this is how women from time immemorial have fit pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and childcare into a life full of other work. (And I'm saying this as someone who went through pregnancy and a C-section in my last year of law school.)
But congratulations to Ms. Hill. I can certainly see how, having studied for the bar exam, she felt determined to get that thing done when the day arrived and not shift to the alternative task of rescheduling and continuing to keep all the minute memories of picky little doctrines alive in her head while she was losing sleep caring for a newborn.
And welcome to the world, little CPA.
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62 comments:
The important story here: The idiots who run the bar exams should perform ritual seppuku and the bodies should be shot into the sun with an Elon Musk rocket ship.
The rules should accommodate people who are covered by the ADA, at a minimum.
Applying some reasonableness might be a good idea, also.
I've heard plenty of stories about tough women who pause some chore or project to give birth and then go right back and finish what they started. But that was my mother's generation and before. That kind of toughness is not something I associate with modern women. The tough modern woman goes to the mat with the bar committee and forces them to make an accommodation, and then crows on Twitter about it.
"Oh, get that would you, Deirdre?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsWxkU0g9Z4&t=33s&ab_channel=goncharev1976
I got very sick the night after the first day of the Maryland bar exam in 1979. At the time, my wife was pregnant, and I ended up taking Bendectin (her morning sickness medication) in order to struggle through the "multi-state" second day of the exam. I fully concede this woman from Loyola has me beat! Congratulations to her and her family - - and I hope she passed the exam!
Impressive and focused.
Possibly over the top. But nonetheless, impressive.
She'll land a job as a junior lawyer in a large Chicago firm and her kid will not see much of her until he's 12. At which time she'll be burning out from working ridiculous hours in a large corporate law firm. She'll look for a position as in-house counsel in a corporation and find a better life-work mix with good pay. But still...she'll burn out after a few years. Just in time to watch her son go off to college.
Her kid will be 18 and off to Michigan instead of Northwestern because he didn't want to stay that close to home. She'll wonder where the years went and find that she rarely hears from him anymore. In the meantime, her husband, with too many nights alone, found that he has a gay side and had been 'experimenting' around the Chicago suburbs while his wife spent many a late night, or even overnights downtown 'working'. As they grow into the upper middle ages, he asks her for a divorce. Tells her he's coming out and that he's never been happier.
They get a divorce. She keeps the house in Oak Park, a lovely community. But lives a lonely life, dealing with human resource issues that come up in the corporation she works at. Things like not hiring enough people of color, or letting go of a person of color, someone overhearing a remark about a gay employee. She works with the Director of Diversity to embark on a full training for every employee in the company, with instructions to legally weed out anyone not in line with proper thought. She thinks back to the day she was in labor with Cassius, taking the bar exam while contracting and pushing out the baby. Exhausting and exhilarating. In many ways the best week of her life.
@Birkel
Read the article. You're making incorrect assumptions. She had accommodations and she could have gotten more. She made choices. She wasn't forced to do that!
@tim maguire
No no no. You are making incorrect assumptions.
Come on. Get this story right.
Accommodations on exams are completely part of the norm.
Very touching indeed. The courageous women are the most valuable people on earth. They handle everything, with a little help from a man.
Cassius. I bet she's a Michigan State alum. So I'm going to say Bravo
Ann Althouse said...
@tim maguire
No no no. You are making incorrect assumptions.
Come on. Get this story right.
Is today own goal day? I'll meet you half way--Somebody needs to get this story right.
I had already asked for an accommodation to get up and go to the bathroom because I was 38 weeks pregnant and they said I'd get flagged for cheating. I couldn't leave the view of the camera.
Anyone should be able to take a bar exam. Not just those that pay a lot of money to go to law school. At the present time, it's nothing but a racket.
This is what women do.
It's in the "news" because it's not typical, as in "man bites dog".
The tough modern woman goes to the mat with the bar committee and forces them to make an accommodation, and then crows on Twitter about it.
Like so - ?
HR’s Guide to Pregnancy and Reasonable Accommodation
Reasonable Accommodations for Pregnant Workers: State and Local Laws
If You’re Pregnant and Working, Know Your Rights
And last but not least, from the, um, Department of Labor -> https://askjan.org/disabilities/Pregnancy.cfm
From Eliot’s Middlemarch
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
So THIS is where CPA's come from!
Born under a bad sign.
You'd thing women wouldn't bitch and nag, if they're so strong. Yet there's always a Women's Workplace Issues committee formed.
One of my classmates in medical school left class on Wednesday and had her baby on Thanksgiving Thursday, and was back to class on Monday.
This might not sound like a big thing, but this was 50 years ago, before the feminist revolution of the early 1970s.
Women were less than 6 percent of physicians back then (less than ten percent of our class were women), and expected to take a year off if they got pregnant. Indeed, she was advised to do that by our teachers but refused, pointing out that she had her first baby during graduate school getting her Masters degree, when she was also teaching part time.
Badass! My calculus teacher in high school once, so the stories said, gave an exam, went home and gave birth, and came into school the next day with the exams graded. I think this one tops that.
This is what women do.
This is what women did, Althouse. Not so much anymore. It's changed in our lifetime. We are about to elect a woman for President* who chose a life without children as the better lifestyle option. Millions of women adore and admire her choice.
I'm cancelling my subscription. Let's just say that I'm abstaining support.
______________________
*Yes, Harris was chosen to succeed Biden, make no mistake.
“This is what women do....” Bullshit! This woman is extraordinary. Maybe you were too.
“Modern” women are more likely to kill their unborn children in the womb than to go through “inconvenience” like this. We are now at 61 million dead babies and counting giving the lie to “women do” what Brianna did.
There are many admirable women. American women as a group are not admirable. It is delusional to lump them with women “from time immemorial.” Really delusional!
“This is what women do....” Bullshit!
I guess I'm surrounded by extraordinary women.
My wife birthed our first child during her medical internship. Our boy had an extremely well planned birth, except for that evening when I got my wife pregnant, which I admit was poor timing on my part. The medical school Dean rallied to assist and encourage her pregnancy. As it turned out, other than wearing increasingly large scrubs, my wife carried on for 9 months without accommodations required. The strength of youth is to be admired and envied.
The only real problem she had after becoming pregnant was falling asleep on her feet after 20+ hours on shift, once, after an immobile hour of standing, holding a retractor during an abdominal surgery. The retractor went flying across the room as she wobbled, and when the surgeon stopped laughing, she was told to stand down from "assisting" with the operation. She also once refused to attempt a blood draw in the ER from a violent schizophrenic meth addict known to be HIV positive. Two large male orderlies later held the patient down, wrapped in a blanket, for the doctor who did take the blood sample. Other than that, she wobbled her way through the medical rotations and interviewed for a residency while as large as a house.
About half her class visited her in the maternity wing during her >12 hours of labor. Most left immediately at onset of a contraction. That semed to freak them out a bit. And the doctors didn't recognize at first the skinny woman who showed up for a pediatric residency after medical school.
Our son was a fixture at medical student parties for the rest of her med school, riding into social occaisions in a hand-carried car seat and being passed around like a football. And of course was a hit at Pediatric parties in residency, where he was a reminder that not all children are horribly ill. He was joined a few years later by a sister, whose origination was planned a bit better.
My wife has a very low opinion of political feminists.
I believe she finds them often frivolous.
Read the article, Althouse. She asked for an accommodation to go to the bathroom and was refused. I think we need a post on what commodes might have to do with accommodations.
Smart move. Re-studying for the bar exam with a newborn around and its attendant lack of sleep would have been rough.
Women evolved some serious abilities in our hundreds of thousands of years in the wilderness, just as men evolved complementary ones. It took both kinds in the wilderness, and now we are expected to pretend that this period of evolution never happened, and we were all created exactly equal by a loving and fair minded God who didn’t play favorites on any abilities. Or at least that’s the worldview I infer from feminism.
"Anyone should be able to take a bar exam. Not just those that pay a lot of money to go to law school.”
Supposedly that guy in the movie Catch Me If You Can, which was based on real life, faked his degree and passed the bar without law school.
How, exactly, did 5Chicago discover this story?
"Strong like bull!"
We are not worthy.
I wonder if this will affect her opinions about abortion.
“The important story here: The idiots who run the bar exams should perform ritual seppuku and the bodies should be shot into the sun with an Elon Musk rocket ship.”
“The rules should accommodate people who are covered by the ADA, at a minimum.
Applying some reasonableness might be a good idea, also.”
The basic problem is that the bar exam is, for many, one of the highest stress things that they have ever done. If you fail it once, you may never be taken that seriously as a lawyer (e.g. Crooked Hillary). Fail it multiple times, and, unless your father was a martyred President, you may never get and keep a high profile attorney job. Needless to say, failing a state bar exam, the first time you take one, strongly suggests that you probably shouldn’t engage in litigation - you are either too dumb, or cannot handle stress.
Which is a preamble to the reality that applicants routinely request accommodations of one type or another, in order to get temporary advantage over other applicants. The easiest, and cleanest response is a blanket response denying accommodations as a matter of policy. The alternative is to turn it into the SATs where a doctors excuse will often get you additional time to take the test, and the richer your parents are, the more likely this seems to happen (I was surprised at my kid’s prep school how many of their fellow students discovered their senior year that they were dyslexic, which typically got them an extra hour each session to take the test).
That said, my memory from the two times I took state bar exams (CO and AZ) that the first day was the MBE (Multistate Bar Exam), the multiple guess part of the test. They had a rule that you couldn’t leave the last half hour of each 3 1/2 hour session, because of the stress level of the others taking the test. I think that I was one of a mere handful, out of 700 or so, able to turn in their tests, and duck out before the 3 hour deadline. Not everyone remaining was stressing out, but there were quite a few. I can see the logic in that sort of environment - those remaining would start freaking out, as the number turning in their tests before the very end turned into a flood in the last minutes.
Imagine the problem of getting an extension of time by merely getting a doctor’s note that you had lately detected dyslexia. Or something similar. 650 applicants held to a 3 1/2 hour time limit, and a fortunate 50 with an extra hour. The law isn’t supposed to work that way. It is supposed to be the same for everyone.
A new life in this world is cause for joy, but a new lawyer? Let's call it a wash.
On her deathbed, she'll be that person who wished she'd spent more time at the office.
Not to be all Jonny Rain Cloud here but she probably doesn't need to be in that big of a rush to pass the bar exam since the job prospects for new lawyers aren't all that great. Although maybe publicizing her amazing grit and determination will encourage somebody to offer her a job if/when she passes the Bar. Maybe not a great job, but a job.
"Anyone should be able to take a bar exam. Not just those that pay a lot of money to go to law school.”
I would have loved it. I think that I could have passed the bar exam after my first year, after attending BAR/BRE (a bar exam prep class). First year is typically mostly care classes, which translates into the subjects tested on the MBE, and in much of the essay portion. BAR/BRE(etc) BAR/BRE (etc) then are structured to give you the rest of the essential material for the other, optional, classes.
This sounds suspiciously like an Anonymous Lawyer post from 2004 - "I just woke up to an e-mail from an associate who's been looking more and more pregnant recently, but was in the office as recently as yesterday. 'I just gave birth to a daughter, [name], this morning at 4:13 A.M. So I will not be in the office today. I will be checking my Blackberry throughout the day, so feel free to let me know if you need anything. Thanks.'"
"I caught COVID-19 after day one of the bar exam, and I finished the exam while on a ventilator in a coma."
You know it is coming, right?
Reminds me of that part in “The Good Earth” where the wife is toiling in the fields... squats and gives birth, then goes back to work...
“This is what women do.
This is what women did, Althouse”
Beat me to it. The woman in the article is exceptional, not typical. And even she couldn’t have done it without a shitload of help and the conveniences of modernity. Let’s not kid ourselves that she gave birth, chopped kindling, milked the cows and then plowed the south Forty, all while nursing ol’ CPA.
Like many properly-raised White middle-class Boomers, Althouse has Class of ‘68 politics but Class of ‘45 personal values. And that creates a whole lot of confusion and misinterpretation when handing out kudos and slinging brickbats.
"Obviously, I really hope I passed but I’m mostly just proud that I pushed through..."
Pushed through...I see what she did there.
This is what women do
????
THIS is? I suppose SOME women pass the bar on their 1st time; but it seems out of the ordinary
(if we take the current crop of democrat leaders as the ordinary)
I would have loved it. I think that I could have passed the bar exam after my first year, after attending BAR/BRE (a bar exam prep class).
California did not require law school attendance for years (Maybe still doesn't) and the secretary of the guy who taught a Bar review class sat through his class a couple of times and then took it and passed.
My two lawyer kids passed it the first time. That's how I knew they were not cut out to be politicians.
When I want to get a rise out of my wife, I remind her that childbirth was, indeed, a horrible and excruciating experience.
Hospital coffee just for a start...
Nice friends you got here, Ann. For godsakes, a woman couldn't possibly have done anything worth praise. We all know they're idiots at best and most certainly lazy.
Michael K said...
I would have loved it. I think that I could have passed the bar exam after my first year, after attending BAR/BRE (a bar exam prep class).
Agree. Perhaps the 3 years were necessary and made the prep class easier to memorize, but that's all it was. Reading huge amounts of material, writing down important cases and memorizing those notes -- all w/in 26 weeks before actually sitting down and taking it.
Fortunately, I passed the 1st time.
" I think that I could have passed the bar exam after my first year, after attending BAR/BRE (a bar exam prep class)."
I think I had a different bar review course, but I also found it fantastic. Anyone who paid attention to it and had at least average intelligence would have passed the multi-state portion of the bar. The authors explained all the things susceptible to multiple choice answers, and only those things. The rumor at the time was that if your multi-state score was high enough, the examiners would not bother to grade the state portion.
madAsHell said...
‘“This is what women do....” Bullshit!
I guess I'm surrounded by extraordinary women.’
Really? You are surrounded by women who took time out from the bar exam to have a baby then went back to finish it the next day nursing between sessions - or similar?
Congratulations to you and “your” extraordinary women.
Thus the special status of women in our society in the manner of women and our Posterity first, and the correctness to distinguish between men and women where sex is significant, and sometimes, for the sake of normalizing functional behaviors and perceptions, where it is not. That said, men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature. Reconcile.
Cut It said...
‘Nice friends you got here, Ann. For godsakes, a woman couldn't possibly have done anything worth praise. We all know they're idiots at best and most certainly lazy.’
I missed that. Who said it? Oh, I see. You said it. Nobody else.
What a woman! A "Karen" she's not - could be our country is fine given this event.
Imagine the pioneer women having to give birth, get up and fix meals, and then work in the fields.
That's great, but did she rejoin her classmates and run after the ambulance when it left the hospital?
Dang, a lot of harsh comments here. The woman took the bar under unusually difficult circumstances. She had a perfect reason not to finish the exam and take it the following year but instead chose to finish it. Good for her and an example for others to just get on with it.
Or the scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life where the poor hardworking Catholic mother drops a newborn while washing dishes at the sink. "Oh, get that, would you Deirdre?"
You'd thing women wouldn't bitch and nag, if they're so strong. Yet there's always a Women's Workplace Issues committee formed.
Twice as funny because it was meant as an observation and not meant as a joke.
Freeman Hunt said...
Smart move. Re-studying for the bar exam with a newborn around and its attendant lack of sleep would have been rough.
10/11/20, 10:29 AM
Margaret Thatcher took the bar exam and passed it when her twins were a year old. Just imagine having two babies to contend with while studying.
Here's a woman i would hire as my lawyer.
For godsakes, a woman couldn't possibly have done anything worth praise. We all know they're idiots at best and most certainly lazy.’
Case-in-point: wife, mother, and judge soon to be Justice Barrett. Also, Palin was a bright star who could have been President, but was instead hunted, judged, and protested by progressives, liberals, feminists, and their ilk. #HateLovesAbortion
That said, men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature. Reconcile.
if as the story says : The test was administered remotely this year amid the novel coronavirus pandemic...
why not carry the laptop / wear body cam like cops for accommodations (except privacy of course_ - unless of course you could not be admitted to bar for lady parts pictures?
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