I thought I’d kick off my Banned Books Week posts with the only title on the 2011 list I hadn’t already read!
Yeah, I can already tell this is going to be downright salacious
Title: My Mom’s Having a Baby
Author: Dori Hillestad Butler
Illustrator: Carol Thompson
Challenged In: Carrollton, Texas and Hillsborough County, Florida
For: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
I feel like one of the most important points of this case which the author attempted to bring up when she was dramatically confronted on Fox and Friends is that this book is shelved in the children’s non-fiction section, J618.2. Even though it looks like a picture book, it’s not stuck in with Good Night Moon and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. It’s with the explanatory books about childbirth, diseases, how blood works, and World War II. And if you let your kid wander around on their own in the non-fiction section, cool, but it’s not like the library makes a secret of what that section is for. Non-fiction books are meant to explain the world in ways a child can understand, and that’s what this book does. Here’s a sample page:
This fetus is clearly rocking out to some music inappropriate for his age group
It goes through month by month of the pregnancy, explaining prenatal development and what an ultrasound is, eventually culminating in birth (with all the blood and grossness tactfully edited out). The only difference between this and the countless other books designed to help parents explain what’s happening to mom is that it goes into more detail about how the baby got in there. Which, come on, they are totally going to want to know: Read the rest of this entry »