In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Health

This week in US juridical misogyny…

1) You’ll be interested to know that if you get fired for breastfeeding, that is not an instance of sex discrimination, according to a ruling from the Eighth Circuit Court that the Supreme Court has decided to let stand, because, well, man can lactate. It’s been known to happen. They just mostly don’t. So, you know, no problem. Also, if your supervisor tells you that you should be at home with your baby, well, he could say that to a man, too, so that’s also not sex discrimination.

A lawyer has linked us to the following: “Just as one final follow-up, here’s a snopes article on the misleading headlines: http://www.snopes.com/info/news/menlactate.asp” Thanks! And sorry I didn’t catch that.

Let’s just get this out there: yes, it is possible for some cis men sometimes to lactate, if they make it a goal and work toward it. The same is true for trans women, and that’s fantastic, in my book, because I have known trans women to whom that would have meant a lot. And trans men certainly can lactate.

That said, I highly doubt the Eighth Circuit Court could give two shits about trans people. Call it my innate cynicism if you must, but I doubt they even thought about trans people. When it comes to cis people, the vast, overwhelming majority of people who lactate are women. End of story. The vast majority of people who are lactating regularly, intensely, and in a way to support a baby are going to be cis women, and then some trans men. Nobody tells men that they should be at home with their babies. Nobody uses men’s reproductive functions to torment them, by, say, refusing a lactating woman access to a room in which she can pump, causing her pain, anxiety, and possible injury (I’ve known women who’ve developed mastitis–it is incredibly painful). This is a throwback to the Rehnquist court, when it was ruled that pregnancy discrimination wasn’t sex discrimination because if a man got pregnant, he’d be subject to the same conditions. And if Rehnquist was contemplating the plight of trans men, I’m the lowest form of life, an anti-vaxxer.

I don’t know how this happened, legally speaking, and I don’t care. It’s a fucking travesty. It reminds me of the title of an opinion piece that ran in the NYT a week or so ago: “Should the Supreme Court Take into Account How Its Rulings Will Affect the Real World?” YES IT FUCKING WELL SHOULD. I don’t see the virtue in adhering to any old document, be it the Bible or the Constitution just for the sake of textual fidelity. This is the REAL WORLD, and we have to live in it, and it needs to be as reasonable as possible.

2) Purvi Patel, in Indiana, is facing up to 70 years in prison for the mutually exclusive “crimes” of having an illegal abortion (feticide) and felony neglect of a dependent minor. The latter charge, of course, requires a live minor, whereas feticide requires a dead fetus, so perhaps you, unlike the Indiana jury, can see the problem here (this is one of the problems with not requiring logical reasoning as a skill in high school). And that’s not even getting into the problems of any kind of abortion being illegal (aside from the kind forced on a pregnant woman against her will–but I know how much juries in this country hate to acknowledge that a woman’s desires matter). Patel’s crime was to order abortifacient drugs on-line and then have a miscarriage/stillbirth. For this she could spend the rest of her life in prison. Not in El Salvador. In Indiana.

What the linked article doesn’t address is how the police got called into the situation in the first place. Patel went to a hospital for heavy vaginal bleeding, and admitted to the doctors that she had been pregnant and had miscarried. So who called the cops? Isn’t there an issue of doctor-patient confidentiality here? Is the lesson that women who do this shouldn’t go to the ER for help, but should just let themselves bleed to death rather than risk public humiliation and decades in prison?

And what about Patel’s race? I wonder what the racial make-up of that jury was, whether it was easy for them to see Patel as some kind of monstrous, exotic child-murderess because she is neither white nor Christian? And where is the father of the fetus in all this? What kind of scumbag lets a woman face this on her own without taking responsibility for his share in her ordeals?

The past was a terrible place–don’t let anti-vaxxers take us back there

I want to maintain Feministe’s proud tradition of attacking anti-vaxers, because these people are the scum of the earth. These are the people who have benefitted most from modern medical advances, but who not only refuse to protect their own children from diseases that used to kill and disable huge numbers of children (and adults, for that matter), who want the benefit of the common good (herd immunity) without contributing to the common good, who fundamentally don’t care if children and adults who can’t get vaccines because their immune systems are compromised die. They are scum.

I fundamentally think that anti-vaxers won’t listen to reason or to evidence, any more than any other kind of science-deniers will. Despite the fact that hundreds of years of organic food and no industrial waste coincided with mass child death and epidemics, they believe that feeding their kids the purest food and water will keep them healthy. They believe that good hygiene wiped out disease (yeah, you know what? By the early 1950s, when polio was still scourging the industrial world, hygiene was well understood. Washing your hands doesn’t prevent polio. You know what prevents polio? The fucking polio vaccine, that’s what.).

Well, fuck them. I strongly believe that we need to ostracize them completely. I already know some pediatricians will not allow children who are not vaccinated into their practice, because they don’t want to put their pre-vaccinated and immuno-compromised patients at risk, and good on them. Schools need to not admit them. We need to make them social lepers. It is fucking criminal that it is the children of anti-vaxers, who have no control over the assholishness of their parents who will bear the brunt of this, just as they will bear the brunt of preventable contagious illness, and we need to ostracize the parents as well, in every way possible.

I mean, look at this asshole:

It’s not my responsibility to inject my child with chemicals in order for [a child who has leukemia] to be supposedly healthy,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s very likely that her leukemia is from vaccinations in the first place.”

“I’m not going to sacrifice the well-being of my child. My child is pure,” he added. “It’s not my responsibility to be protecting their child.”

CNN asked Wolfson if he could live with himself if his unvaccinated child got another child gravely ill.

“I could live with myself easily,” he said. “It’s an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. I’m not going to put my child at risk to save another child.”

He blamed the Jacks family for taking Maggie to the clinic for care.

“If a child is so vulnerable like that, they shouldn’t be going out into society,” he said.

You know what? It fucking well is all of our responsibility to keep each other’s children healthy. That’s what it means to live in a fucking society. And it is not fucking “unfortunate” when children die. It’s a trauma and tragedy from which the family–to say nothing of the child–never recovers. A preventable trauma and tragedy. And you shouldn’t take your child for fucking medical care when she’s sick? Does this asshole, who is a doctor, even hear himself? He is scum. He is evil. And he should lose his medical license for spouting this bilge. I can’t emphasize this enough, no matter what his beliefs may be, VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE LEUKEMIA.

He could live with himself if he got someone else’s kid killed? Could he live with the lawsuit? Or–and I was just talking about this with my father–could he live with that kid’s parents coming after him with guns? My father and I were talking about a news story he’d read years ago about a father who stepped calmly and openly up to the man who had murdered his child and shot to death him as he was being walked into the courthouse for his trial. My dad told me that he completely understood, because as far as he was concerned, if you outlived your children, your life was over. That nothing else mattered anymore, life would just be ashes, and that that was why he wouldn’t care about losing his freedom at that point. Does this asshole think he’s immune to that? That a parent who loses their kid thanks to his bullshit won’t come after him? And I tell you what, I would raise money for that parent’s legal defense.

In better news, here’s a news story about heroic parents suing to keep unvaccinated kids out of his child’s school. Good on him. I hope he wins.

I fucking hate these people. Vaccines and antibiotics are two most important and effective medical advances we have ever made. In the 1940s, mortality for children 1-4 was 250 deaths per 100,000 children, and for children 5-14 it was 100. Now it’s around 25 in the first category and around 15 in the second. Infant mortality was around 50 per 1000 live births and is now around 6. There are pretty horrifying disparities by race and class, but the pattern of decline has actually been the same. Why? Fucking vaccinations and antibiotics are why. Maybe anti-vaxxers find the prospect of learning disabilities and autism more upsetting than that of dead children, but that says far more about them than anything else.

Where are the forced-birthers on this issue? They’re so eager to destroy reproductive choice for women in the name of saving babies–why are they silent when it comes to parental choice regarding vaccines? Surely if “it’s not a choice, it’s a child” were ever an appropriate slogan, it is here.

Taking Medication While Pregnant: I’m Not Sorry

Hello to everybody! I know I dropped out of sight for a while, not just in terms of posting but also in terms of commenting. I wasn’t ready to talk about why, but having just received good news and passed a benchmark, I am now.

After years of trying to maneuver myself into a good situation and despairing, and not as many tries as I had feared, I find myself pregnant! I am delighted—I know I’ve mentioned on these boards how much I want to have a baby, and how anxious I was getting as the calendar pages flipped over with no possibility in sight. I just passed the first trimester, and my screenings have all come back with good news—my baby (because this is a wanted pregnancy and I’m thinking of it as a baby, I will use the word “baby”) is healthy, as far as modern medicine can tell thus far. What I hadn’t realized was how exhausting pregnancy is. I’d been told, but I hadn’t fully understood. Six o’clock rolls around and I’m ready to pass out. I haven’t been able to engage as much as I would like in any number of things, Feministe included.  And I’m sorry.

I feel and am extraordinarily lucky to have the family I have, the support I have, the health insurance and access to medical care that I have.

One of the major decisions I had to make was what to do about the medications I’m on to keep my depression in remission. There’s a lot of anxiety flying back and forth about pregnant women taking any medications, let alone one as new and unknown as one of the meds I’m taking. Hell, if you order sushi in the US someone is likely to tell you off. I originally tried to do what I thought was the good, responsible thing and taper off my meds.

This went over like a lead balloon. I went down one milligram on one of my meds and within a few weeks I was passing the time by idly wondering how I would kill myself if, you know, I decided to do such a thing, not that I was planning on it, but I wanted to make sure I would know what steps to take if I did decide to, just because you never know. Because that’s a totally normal train of thought to follow while zoning out on the subway. Nothing crazy about that, no sir. (It’s my mental illness, and if I want to characterize the thought processes it entails as crazy, I will do so. I know it’s pejorative. I mean to be pejorative. My depressive thought processes are the product of mental illness and also should be condemned. They are detached from reality, incorrect, irrational, self-destructive, and corrupt. But if you would feel better if you mentally substitute “fucked up” for “crazy,” that’s fine by me.)

So I went to see a specialist in reproductive psychiatry (I live in New York City, don’t you know)—and again, believe me, I know exactly how lucky I am to be able to do that. She met with me during a four-hour consultation and at the end told me that whatever possible, minor, and even as-yet-unknown potential side effects my medications might have on my developing baby were completely dwarfed by the significant, major, and enduring effects my depression would definitely have on my developing baby. I was floored—I’d never before considered that my depression could hurt a baby I was making, but indeed, the doctor told me that they can test children even at three or four and still find significant differences—and not good ones—between children whose mothers were depressed during pregnancy and those whose mothers were not.

Why should I have been surprised? I think it’s part of the bizarre mentality in the US that somehow we can separate the interests of a developing fetus/soon-to-be baby—or even an actual child—from the interests of the woman making it or raising it. This has gone on for a while, to the point that scientists actually had to prove that if pregnant women are malnourished, their babies will suffer. The original incarnation of welfare in the US was just ADC—Aid to Dependent Children. No provision was made for their mothers—because as long as the kids get some food, having a starving mother won’t hurt them, right? Alcoholism is bad for the babies of pregnant women. Smoking is bad for the babies of pregnant women. Guess what? Alcoholism and smoking are bad for the women as well. But we don’t give a shit about women, so instead of understanding those things as self-destructive, and the women who engage in them as making the best they can of a difficult situation we run around acting as if pregnant people—people with wanted pregnancies—are willfully trying to harm their babies.

Depression is a whole body illness. It upsets eating and sleeping patterns. It dampens your immune system. It causes physical pain and difficulty as well as draining you of energy. It removes your ability to care for yourself. We can see it in the physical make-up of our brains. Why wouldn’t it affect my baby? To say nothing of my misery. I count too. I am not just an incubator.

The New York Times would not run an article encouraging women with asthma to abjure maintenance medications while pregnant. Or women with diabetes. Or women with any other chronic non-mental illness. But shortly after I made this decision, it did run one attacking the wisdom of staying on anti-depressants while pregnant. I know this because my grandfather helpfully emailed me and asked if I’d like him to send it to me (I said no thanks, I’d consulted with doctors and was perfectly happy with my decision.).

I think that’s irresponsible. It’s dismissive of mental illness. It’s dismissive of women’s suffering. It’s dismissive of the damage depression can do to mother and child.

And I’m glad to link to this rebuttal piece by psychiatrists specializing in the field.

Forgoing anti-depressants is not like skipping one’s daily latte (and quite frankly, unless you’re consuming superhuman levels of caffeine, having a latte is fine). It’s not like having seltzer with dinner instead of wine or beer. It’s not like skipping the sauna. Anti-depressants are not a minor indulgence, a luxury, a frill on my daily life. They are, for me and for many other people, an essential medication that prevents a debilitating chronic illness from consuming my life. I depend on them. That means everybody who depends on me—my godson, my family—depends on them too, because without them I can’t function. That’s what it means to have a chronic illness. And being pregnant doesn’t make that go away.

I’m writing this to provide information for anyone else out there who takes anti-depressants and is contemplating pregnancy, or is already pregnant. You have a right to your health, and so does your baby. You’re not being “selfish” if you stay on your meds—you are taking care of yourself and taking care of your baby too.

Time magazine: I can’t even.

Time magazine’s annual poll of the year’s “worst words” looks for words that make you “definitely cringe,” even “exhale pointedly,” even “seek out the nearest pair of chopsticks and thrust them through your own eardrums like straws through plastic lids.” And it asks people to “vote another word off the island” (and if I never hear that phrase again, I’ll be okay). This year’s poll includes bae, basic, bossy, disrupt, I can’t even…, influencer, kale, literally, om nom nom nom, obi, said no one ever, sorry not sorry, turnout, yaaasssss, and… feminist.

South Carolina: Swell for fetuses, less so for victims of domestic violence

In Florida, Stand Your Ground was used as the foundation of George Zimmerman’s defense after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin. In South Carolina, it was used to defend a man who walked out of the house with a gun to confront “women thugs” who had threatened his daughter; he ended up shooting a teenage boy in his car instead. Also in Florida, Marissa Alexander has repeatedly been denied the chance to use the Stand Your Ground defense against charges after she fired a warning shot above the head of her abusive husband. This month, Charleston prosecutors moved to further endanger the Marissa Alexanders of South Carolina by saying that Stand Your Ground shouldn’t apply to victims of domestic violence who confront their abusers.

Quick publicity: Detroit Water Project

If you’ve been following US news recently, you have probably read about Detroit Water and Sewage shutting off water to thousands of homes, some of which owing as little as two months’ worth of bills.  It’s a perfect storm of right-wing class and race war–we’re talking about largely impoverished, mostly black people.  For some unimaginable reason, water has not been shut off to any of the delinquent corporate accounts, even though they owe around 30 million dollars.

So there are thousands of homes in a city in the US in which people cannot flush the toilet, or wash their hands, or even get a drink of water.  And children’s welfare authorities have the right to take children whose homes do not have running water.  What does this have to do with feminism?  Well, feminism is either a social justice movement or it’s not–either the needs and priorities of women without water are the needs and priorities of feminism..or we’re just a special interest group catering to the needs of the middle class and white.

This kind of attack on poor communities, on black communities strikes at the vital work generations of women have done to maintain and nurture those communities’ strength and resistance to racist exploitation and oppression.  So I want to link to two sites.  One, the Detroit People’s Water Board, co-founded by Charity Hicks, whose water was shut off at 6 one morning, does political advocacy work.  The other, the Detroit Water Project, is a direct help site–you can make a donation that goes toward paying off somebody’s water bill so they can have their water turned back on.

I swear, this country would commodify air if it could, and smother those who couldn’t pay the bill.

Poisoning Black Children

Edited because, I’m sorry, I forgot TW: medical racism and exploitation, child abuse.

 

I just want to make sure that we’re all aware that twenty years ago, decades after the Tuskegee syphilis “experiment,” scientists affiliated with Johns Hopkins partnered with slumlords in order to deliberately cause lead poisoning in black toddlers from impoverished families to experiment with cheaper methods of cleaning up lead paint.

I first read about this three years ago, when the parents filed a class action suit.  I couldn’t think about anything else for days.  I couldn’t sleep.  These scientists deliberately poisoned children.  They lured families in with unusually low rents.  They monitored the kids’ blood lead levels.  And they didn’t do anything to help when those levels climbed and climbed.

This “study” passed Johns Hopkins board of ethics.

When I first found about this, I maintained that if one of these parents decided that a civil suit was bullshit, and instead decided to cut the throats of each and every person with knowledge of what was happening–including that damn ethics board, I would raise money for a legal defense, or a plane ticket to a country without an extradition agreement.  Because this is one of the most horrifying things I can imagine.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be one of those parents, having tried and tried to what was best for my family and  children, and then to find out that I had been bamboozled, that I was complicit in my own child’s poisoning, all so slumlords could save a few bucks.

Black people, poor people, Native Americans, have real reasons for being suspicious of US medical care.  Centuries of being experimented on–of having one’s children experimented on–will do that.

As far as I know, the case is on-going.  I can’t find any reference to a verdict.

Robin Williams open thread

[Content note: Suicide and mental illness]

Yesterday, after a long battle with depression, Robin Williams took his own life. He left behind a family that loved him dearly and a legion of fans who loved having someone to make them laugh and cry and think, even as he himself was so frequently in a dark place. He made kids’ movies with jokes that only adults would get, he made movies for adults that made you forget he was the genie from Aladdin, he made a few zany comedies that possibly made you stupider just by watching them but were so entertaining that who cares, and he made people feel better. He gave joy.