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

Tag: Medicine

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?

Donate for an Actual Cure

It’s October, it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the U.S. is awash in a sea of bubblegum pink. The most recognizable, of course, is that of Susan G. Komen for the Cure and their ubiquitous pink ribbon, pink t-shirts, and potentially carcinogenic co-branded pink products. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to help “end breast cancer forever”–catch it early, treat it effectively, and discover and eliminate the reasons it occurs in the first place–without going through SGK. The simplest way is just to go straight to the source.

Pregnancy Blues: Why Aren’t We Talking About Pre-Natal Depression?

Feministe friend Jessica Grose has an important series up at Slate on prenatal depression, its pervasiveness, and the stigma still attached to it (Part 1 is here; you can click through at the bottom of the piece to read parts two and three). After detailing her own experiences with depression during her pregnancy, Grose looks at the utter dearth of conversation (and certainly empathy) for women who are pregnant and clinically depressed. She writes:

Latch On, NYC–OR ELSE (Updated 8/1)

Starting September 3, baby formula will be a controlled substance at some New York City hospitals. Under the health department’s voluntary Latch On NYC program, 27 hospitals are literally hiding the baby formula under lock and key, tucking it away in distant storerooms and locked dispensaries like legitimate medications that need to be tracked. [See update. -C] Nurses will be expected to document a medical reason for every bottle a newborn receives, and mothers will get a breastfeeding lecture every time they ask for a bottle of formula.

(Now with 100 percent more updates!)

Arizona HB 2036 is bad for women anyway.

A week ago, Arizona HB 2036 passed the state Senate and headed to the House. The bill centers around the belief that a fetus feels pain at 20 weeks and thus bans abortion after 20 weeks of gestation (with an exception for the life of the mother). HB 2036 specifies gestational age “as calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman,” leading many to believe that it actually bans abortion after 18 weeks of gestation.

This isn’t accurate. It’s still 20 weeks. But there is so, so much more to be angry about.

Facts, myths, and blankety-blank lies about Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen Foundation

As the furor over Komen’s de-funding of Planned Parenthood continues, more and more myths about PP, its mission, and the impact of this cruel and foolish decision are getting thrown around. Frequently, those myths get lost and go uncorrected in the presence of bigger and more ideological arguments.

That’s really not fair.

Alas, this is merely the tip of the bullshit iceberg. As the Komen debacle is nowhere near coming to an end, we can expect new and exciting myths and lies to arise, like the head of a Hydra, as others are debunked. To that end, watch this space, and by all means contribute your own debunkings in comments.

Dr. Erik Fleischman and Involuntary Sterilization

Via Femonomics, we find a really disturbing post from Dr. Erik Fleischman, an American doctor practicing in Tanzania who brags about participating in an involuntary sterilization, calling the doctor who performed the procedure a “hero.” After a pregnant patient’s heart stops beating on the operating table during a C-section (because they screwed up the epidural and then didn’t monitor her vital signs), Dr. Erik performs rib-cracking CPR, and his partner doctor ties the patient’s tubes:

“Daktari, the epidural injection must have gone too high and paralyzed all her nerve function,” I said as I started doing chest compression over her sternum.. I heard a rib crack with a loud POP under my hand and I winced.
“Yes Daktari. I believe that is correct,” said Dr. M. She is a young woman and this is her fifth baby. She has a good heart.”
Fifth baby, I thought. Holy shit. All I could think of was five orphans.
“C’mon, cmon,” I said to no one in particular, “this cannot go down like this.”
As I pumped on her chest I saw Dr. M working inside her belly with his one good hand. With her body heaving back and forth from the chest compressions it must have been like trying to do a tattoo in a car on a bumpy road.
“How’s she doing down there, Daktari?” I asked.
“Fine. I am tying her tubes. I think she does not need another baby after this.” Dr. M was a cool character. I was wondering if she was going to survive the next five minutes and he was already doing family planning.
“Cmon, cmonnnnnnnnnnn…………..”

Suddenly her eyes opened up and she gasped loudly like someone inhaling a first breath after nearly drowning. I felt her heart. It was beating again. I”m a Buddhhist, but I reflexively said: Jesus.

“Daktari, she’s back,” I said, “She’s back.”
“Excellent work, Daktari. It is good that you were here tonight. It is good that I hurt my wrist.” His version of Tanzanian karma, I suppose. “Daktari, I think we should finish quickly.”

I quickly washed my hands again and we finished up. I even closed the incision on her skin with a neat plastic surgery closure. This point of finesse would ultimately never be noticed through the stretchmarks and redundant skin of five babies, but it was the right thing to do. The patient didn’t remember anything that had happened. It was like she went away and then came back. We told her she had a baby boy. She asked why her chest was hurting. Dr. M told her not to worry about it. She was wheeled into the recovery room. Dr. M. told me to go home. He would handle it from here.

The post has been taken down, but it’s cached here if you want to read it.

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Vote no on bullshit

On Tuesday, November 8, the people of Mississippi vote on Initiative 26–the “personhood amendment”–which declares that personhood begins at the moment of fertilization. It’s just as ridiculous as it sounds and has no basis in science or law–just in conservative morality and controlling women. So, y’know, same ol’.

Initiative 26 adds just 35 words to the constitution of Mississippi:

SECTION 33. Person defined. As used in this Article III of the state constitution, “The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”

Proponents would have you believe that those 35 words will have minimal impact on women in the state of Mississippi, outside of outlawing abortion (which is huge enough in its own right). Every fact sheet or FAQ you get from groups like Yes on 26 has the same list of things that the amendment won’t do: won’t outlaw birth control, won’t cost the state money, won’t prosecute women for miscarriages. And from an entirely literal reading, that’s actually true. The amendment doesn’t say anything outside of those 35 words. In fact, the danger of Initiative 26 lies in what the amendment doesn’t say: the exceptions and restrictions it doesn’t guarantee. Thirty-five words can do a huge amount of damage, and pretending it can’t means a lot of misleading, equivocating, and flat-out lying for groups like Yes on 26.

So to clear a few things up:

Yes, the bill can be used to outlaw all abortion. Obviously.

Yes, the bill can be used to outlaw the birth control pill. The vast majority of the medical community agrees that the Pill works by providing hormones that tell the body not to ovulate–when sperm is introduced into the uterus, there’s nothing for it to fertilize, so there’s no embryo. On the very off chance an egg slips through, though, the hormones also have thickened the cervical mucus so the sperm can’t get to the egg. And on the very off-off chance that supersperm does get through, it can’t penetrate the egg. It has been suggested that the Pill also might thin the lining of the uterus such that said unlikely zygote wouldn’t be able to implant. The medical community has seen no evidence that this third mechanism actually takes place, but they’re obliged to include it in information about the Pill just because the possibility exists. So if your bill identifies personhood as beginning at the moment of fertilization, then yes, it will outlaw any medication that could possibly prevent implantation of an zygote, even if it that doesn’t actually happen.

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