Mothers Face Tough Calls

Stacey Lovelace-Tolbert was like many first-time moms. She wanted to do what was best for her baby.

So when she had her daughter, Ryann, in August 2003, she decided to breastfeed for a year.

But her plans changed when she was called to training camp with the WNBA's Minnesota Lynx this spring.

With her husband playing basketball overseas, Lovelace-Tolbert brought her mom to camp to help with Ryann.

Not even two weeks later, though, Lovelace-Tolbert found herself shopping for formula. Her mom had to go home and back to work. All out of options, Lovelace-Tolbert had to send 9-month-old Ryann on a plane with her.

"I wish there was something to where I would have been able to keep her in Minnesota with me," she said.

But there wasn't. The league, which will finish its eighth regular season on Sunday, doesn't provide child-care for its 13 mothers.

League spokesman John Maxwell says the WNBA encourages teams to help players with children. But encouragement doesn't often lead to results.

Michael Messner, chair of sociology at USC, said not having child-care available was a double standard. Society, he said, tends to assume that women should be responsible for taking care of children, even if they are the primary breadwinner in the family.

"If we're going to put that on her, we should provide her with help and probably higher pay," he said. "But given the nature of the WNBA, it doesn't sound like that will happen anytime soon."

Maxwell agreed, and said a league-wide policy regarding child-care won't even be an option until the WNBA's collective-bargaining agreement expires three years from now.

"Even if we could get an option, because right now there is not an option," Lovelace-Tolbert said. "It's like either your family helps you or that's it ... you can't play. Somebody has to take care of the baby."

Or babies in Helen Darling's case.

She is the mother of three -- as in triplets. The Minnesota guard is in her first season with the Lynx. Last year Darling played for Cleveland, where her sons, Ja-Juan and Jalen, and her daughter Nevaeh, are living with their father.

Darling said the Rockers were more accommodating to mothers than the Lynx. In Cleveland the team had a family room where children could be dropped off and looked after during games. Even something as small as that, she said, made a difference.