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If a revolution were organized by women…

New York Times Magazine had an amazing article this week,
The New Abortion Providers, by Emily Bazelon. It talks about efforts over the last thirty years to make abortions a part of mainstream medical practice.

This approach reminded me of a discussion that I had with a couple of ladies at church. Despite their age (or because of it), they were die-hard feminists and progressive Christians. They talked about how their grandmothers were also feminists, but in a quiet way, behind the scenes. They opined that behind any social movement that was successful had women doing the cooking and organizing while the men were doing the blustering. But at the same time, they didn’t embrace the dominant narrative of feminism. Jo Cranson mentioned Ashley Montague interviewing a grandmother who ask why she should settle for equality when it’s less than what I had before. Robinmarie McClement cited Susan B. Anthony being very concerned about women losing their quiet power behind the throne, if they pursued feminism as a public battle.

Protests and gauntlets in front of free-standing clinics are effective because abortions are a marginalized medical practice. If more doctors performed abortions in their offices or in a hospital, it would make it much more difficult for protesters to single out patients. This change would involve making abortion a standard procedure in the practice of family doctors, internists, and OB/GYN.

In 1995, Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education made abortion training a requirement for all OB/GYN residency programs, meaning that medical students would be receiving mandated hours of lecture on how to perform abortion. This motivation behind this move was to make abortion part of the professional qualifications of a doctor. Even if the student never performs an abortion, they needed to be educated about it.

The next step was to make in-roads into academic medicine by establishing fellowships to provide advanced training and to support research.

“A physician at the U.C.S.F. medical school set up the Family Planning Fellowship, a two-year stint following residency that pays doctors to sharpen their skills in abortion and contraception, to venture into research and to do international work. In recent years, the fellowship has expanded to 21 universities, including the usual liberal-turf suspects — Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, U.C.L.A. — but also schools in more conservative states, like the University of Utah, the University of Colorado and Emory University in Georgia.”

International work was an important component because it exposed the fellows to countries where back alley abortions were still common. Another side effect of the residencies is that the physicians need to perform enough abortions to “train to competency.” In other words, they need to do enough procedures to be able to handle complications. This process often involves performing many, many abortions in a hospital setting, because the complication rates for first-trimester abortions are so low (about 1%). This training usually occurs in hospitals, which means greater, safe access for women. Coming out of these fellowships, residents are equipped to make decisions about the place of abortion in their own practice. The decision whether or not to offer thee treatment is not necessarily a simple yes or no, but possibly choosing a cut-off, such as 7, 9, or 13 weeks.

These small changes are brilliant, because they don’t involve direct confrontation with the protesters on the front lines. They make abortion more available by changing the context. If physicians could bring the simple procedure into the medical fold, it would reduce the need for free-standing clinics and the vulnerability of their patients. (An abortion at 9 weeks gestation produces no recognizes fetal parts and takes less than five minutes by a skilled provider, using device that is “about 10 inches long, costs only $30 and looks like the kind of appliance you might find in a kitchen drawer.”)

There are still other obstacles in the way, such as hospitals being squeamish about associated with abortion and the cost of extra medical insurance, but change is afoot. Moreover, this is a change brought about largely by women for women, with the support of male colleagues, away from the glare of publicity and politics.

Many of the protégées Grimes is talking about are women. In the first generation after Roe, abortion providers were mostly men because doctors were mostly men. Since then, women have streamed into the ranks of OB-GYN and family medicine. They are now the main force behind providing abortion.

Let’s hear it for social revolutions organized by women.

Sendak’s Trilogy and The Secret Life of Children


A few months ago, we started reading Maurice Sendak’s books to Lentil. We’ve had “Where the Wild Things Are” and “In the Night Kitchen” for a while, but Lentil wasn’t ready to appreciate them yet. We had read certain books over and over again, and we were ready for something new. She loved them. The stories are not at all sensible or logical, and the art is beautiful. She looked at the pictures so closely and was so quiet while I was reading. The book jacket for “In the Night Kitchen” mentions that these books are part of trilogy, according to Sendak. Since Lentil liked these books so much, I decided to hunt down the third.

The local children’s book store had not heard of this, so I turned to the Internet. So the third book is “Outside Over There.” Most of the reviews on Amazon are positive, but a few parents were horrified by the book. The plot involves a young girl has to rescue her kidnapped baby sister from goblins (who look like babies) while their parents aren’t paying attention. In the reviews on Amazon, the parents felt that the book didn’t provide reasonable role-modeling of parents and might give their children nightmares; however, they did like the Wild Things and Night Kitchen. I found this odd, because parents are entirely absent from those books, and scary things happen in those books too (Max meets monsters and Mickey is baked in a cake.)

Although the three books don’t have the same characters, the books are a trilogy because they are thematically related. According to Sendak, the books are about

how children master various feelings — anger, boredom, fear, frustration, jealousy — and manage to come to grips with the realities of their lives

A recent article in the New York Times, Maurice Sendak’s Concerns, Beyond Where the Wild Things Are mentions that Sendak had relentless nightmares about kidnapping. Sendak is also haunted by a terrible sense of inadequacy, even now as he approaches his 81. Journalist Patricia Cohen wrote:

That Mr. Sendak fears that his work is inadequate, that he is racked with insecurity and anxiety, is no surprise. For more than 50 years that has been the hallmark of his art. The extermination of most of his relatives and millions of other Jews by the Nazis; the intrusive, unemployed immigrants who survived and crowded his parents’ small apartment; his sickly childhood; his mother’s dark moods; his own ever-present depression — all lurk below the surface of his work, frequently breaking through in meticulously drawn, fantastical ways.

As children mature, it is good and appropriate for them to separate from their parents and be able to function independently. The degree of separation and independence, of course, varies with age and the personality of the child. It is fiction to suggest that a parent can be present for every moment of a child’s life. I believe that children can have complex internal lives, right before our eyes at an age much younger age than we expect. Last month on This American Life, Episode 361 entitled “Fear of Sleep” was on sleep disorders, both medical and emotional. Act IV was about a boy, Seth Lind, who saw Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining when he was six years old and had trouble falling asleep for the next two years. The horror movie particular affected him because the movie was told from the point of view of a young child. As part of the segment, Seth interviews his mother about that period of time. She had no idea that he was so tormented and recalled that he was a happy, go-lucky kid. Later in the segment, Seth is asked why he never talked to his parents about his fear of sleep. His answer was along the lines of: in the end, everyone goes to sleep and you have to deal with it on your own. At the risk of sounding cynical, I think there’s an essential truth there. We’re much better off giving children support, skills, and freedom, than attempting the impossible task of monitoring them 24/7.

Evil in the World

In Adult Sunday School, we are going through some curriculum on “Living the Questions.” The theme for this month is the question, “If God is all-powerful, all-loving, and all-good, how can evil exist?” There are a number of prompts for discussion in the material and I’ll be responding to some of them here. I’ll start with a discussion of the question itself.

I think the question starts from the wrong place. It assumes that God is in complete control of everything that happens. If this is the case, then we are simply automatons who behave in a deterministic manner. But God didn’t make us that way. We were given free will and can act any way we choose. One explanation that I have heard is that God gave us free will so that He could be loved by creations who choose to, rather than being programmed to. It is far less meaningful to hear a trained parrot say “I love you” on cue, than it is to hear a person say “I love you” with joy in his eyes.

Because God gave us free will, He doesn’t control absolutely everything. But this does not diminish his power, love, goodness, or presence in our lives. Because we have free will, we can choose good or evil. Adam and Eve were given the choice whether or not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Jesus was tempted by power and by the opportunity to turn away from ministry.

Evil is not a dark menace out in the world. Evil is a possibility in each one of us. Evil is an act that diminishes us as individuals or diminishes humanity as a whole. By using this definition, evil can be both small and big. It can be the resentment that we harbor against a fellow driver. It can be the atrocities committed by a warlord. The challenge for us as humans is to confront evil possibilities in the minutiae of daily life and turn away from it.

Suffering

Why is there suffering in the world? And where is God during suffering?

To build on what I have written above, there is suffering because an individual makes a choice to act in a manner that diminishes themselves, others, or the collective. God is present in the world, as He always is. We can turn to him for strength or we can turn away in anger. Author and Auschwitz survivor, Elie Weisel, was angry at good for a long time after World War II. But in order to be angry at God, one must a) believe that He exists and b) have a relationship with him. I am reminded of the poem Footprints in the Sand in which the protagonist sees her/his life flash before him as a series of footprints in the sand along the shore. The protagonist notices that most of the time there are two sets of footprints, but during difficult times, there is only one set. She/he confronts God about this disparity, and He replies:

The Lord replied, “My precious, precious child,
I love you and I would never, never leave you
during your times of trial and suffering.
“When you saw only one set of footprints,
it was then that I carried you.”

If God is present in the world, does He intervene and take direct action? Sometimes. We really like it when God’s actions are undeniable and obvious. For example, Moses and the burning bush, Joshua and the walls of Jericho, and Noah. But it’s not always the way we think He does or should. For example, the maltreatment of Job. A friend suggested the idea of “severe mercy.” God’s mercy can sometimes be severe in the sense that He can use negative events in our lives to bring us closer to Him. I’m a bit uncomfortable with this idea, but it does make one wonder. Sometimes bad things just happen. Sometimes bad things are part of God’s plan. It’s hard to know.

Does Satan get a bum rap?

Definitely. Satan is a personification of evil and distracts us from the insidiousness of the evil within. It suggests that we look outward for the cause of evil (and the solutions to it). It suggests that Satan is out there in the world and leads to counterproductive ideas like demonic possession and devil worshiping. These phenomena can be explained through much simpler mechanisms, such as our own human foibles.

Satan as a personification of evil is an oversimplification. It’s an attempt to explain the world in black and white terms, with God on the side of good and Satan on the side of evil. Things are actually much more complex. There are shades of gray and marginally better or worse choices. The personification turns Satan into a fetish, like a monkey wrench thrown into the great order of things. This concept is misleading, because it causes us to not look for the evil in ourselves.

The trouble with categories

I previously blogged about how troublesome categories can be in my post on an area of India where people were being pressured to declare themselves either Hindu or Muslim after centuries of practicing a hybrid religion. These issues of categories seems to come up on our modern age where it’s necessary to put people into on group or another, so they can fill out a form or fit into a field in a computer database. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star wrote about precisely this phenomenon in “Sorting Things Out“.

Here’s another example of the problems that arise when it becomes possible to categorize things at a finer granularity than in the past. This story from the BBC reports on how an “Arctic Map shows dispute hotspots.” New technology has allowed us to map the Arctic more precisely than before. As a result, circumpolar countries have more “facts” that they can use to argue over national boundaries. Fortunately, being cold-weather cultures with Northern temperaments, these countries will likely settle things in an orderly fashion.

Whither wet nurses?

Rita Arens’ post Whose Boobies? on BlogHer caught my interest. In this and other posts, she is honest about not being entirely successful at breastfeeding her child, because she had difficulty identifying breasts as anything, but sexual. In this post, she mentions misgivings that she and other women have about wet nurses and cross nursing (nursing some one else’s child). Some of the concerns that she cites are medical issues, cultural taboos, and intimacy concerns.

While I think these do play a part, to me the most significant factor that has changed is the family structure. In the current age, we think of the nuclear family as a good thing. The basic family unit is now mom, dad, and kids, with little extended family around. We live together, work together, and bond together in these units. A reliance on someone else for bonding or emotional sustenance is a kind of failure, especially for the mom. In the past, and in some places now, a child is raised by an extended family. A baby could be picked up and comforted by anyone. There were many hands– and many mammaries– to share the work. Extended families were the social safety net. These arrangements are what is denoted by the phrase “it takes a village to raise a child.”

In this analysis, milk banks are a little more acceptable than wet nurses, because only the nourishment is being transferred. Actually, it’s illegal in the US to sell breast milk, because trade in bodily fluids, such as blood, is prohibited. Hence, we have blood banks and milk banks. A volunteer blood donation program generally has higher quality blood (e.g. fewer pathogens) than programs where donors are compensated financially for their contributions. (Cue the image of the homeless person with the leaking bandage on his arm and a few dollars in his pocket.) Consequently, one certainly couldn’t make a living by selling breast milk. But what about providing wet nursing as a service?

While we’re at it, why are men allowed to donate sperm and receive financial compensation? Sounds like a double standard, I say. It’s far less medically risky and socially damaging to share breast milk than sperm. There are many children out there who are wondering who is their anonymous sperm donor dad.

Dreamboarding, not waterboarding

I saw this post today on dreamboarding, and the first thing that I thought of was waterboarding. It turns out that the two have nothing to do with each other, except for the coincidental use of the term “boarding,” but what if…

Dreamboarding is a technique for presenting your dreams or aspirations in a visual format. Kind of like a scrapbooking/collage/dreamcatcher mash up. It’s supposed to be done to celebrate the full moon, with the hope that the dreams will come true.

Waterboarding, in the other hand, is a torture technique. I blogged about this previously, but essentially it simulates drowning by pouring water into the victim’s mouth and nose.

What if dreamboarding was a peace-building technique where you poured dreams into your enemy until they drowned in them? By immersing him or her in one’s hopes, fears, aspirations, love, joy, sorrows, and nightmares, one could win over hearts and minds, rather than alienate them. War is waged only against the “other,” that is, against those who are not one of us. There is no “them,” there is only “we.” Resources, territory, and power are not zero sum games. Peace is not just the absence of war, it’s the presence of a stable, just, and fair community of people who are fed, clothed, healthy, and sheltered.

Economics of POW Camp

I was referred to this journal article on “Economics of POW Camp” as a classic paper in economics. I can see why economists get their students to read it. The article describes a number trade arrangements that emerged spontaneously, and as a result serve to reinforce economic principles. It’s long, but interesting.

The article was written very shortly after the end of the war, so memories are fresh. The author was a former POW, with first hand knowledge. The diction and prose is very sophisticated. It uses relatively complex sentence constructions, that are surprisingly easy to understand. I don’t know anyone who writes like that these days. I know I don’t, because I’m always worried about making complex ideas understandable. Consequently, I write wordy, informal text. The writing in the article is formal and preserves the complexity.

It talks about how systems of trade, barter, and commerce were developed around rations in POW camps in Germany during World War II. Note that these are POW camps and not concentration camps, so the residents were actually fed. The soldiers received basic rations from their German captors, so their basic needs were looked after. The Red Cross also distributed rations that included cigarettes, chocolate bars, tea, and so on. Occasionally, care packages would arrive in the post.

These were soldiers who were used to working in a hierarchy and ranks were preserved and respected within the camps. As well, sections of the camp organized nationally, partly due to Germans having separate camps for some countries, but also the military shadow organization establishing chains of command and lines of communication.

While people did initially barter and trade for goods, the cigarette became the basic unit of currency to establish fair prices across permanent camps and limit arbitrage.

The British eventually set up a store and a restaurant! People came to the restaurant for prepared foods and entertainment.

Probably the most interesting POW camp that I have heard about was the one after the Korean War. “They Chose China” is a film about US soldiers who decided to stay in China after the Korean War. Video of the film is available on YouTube. These men went on to have wives and families. Some went back to the US after some years, but others never returned. Anyhow, the POW camp was run by the Chinese in consultation with some officers were who selected to represent the men. The Chinese asked the representatives about what Americans liked, and for the most part they provided. They had games, sports, crafts, activities… the list is endless. At one point they had an Olympic games. The Chinese treated the soldiers as guests and provided lots of education about communism and Chinese language. After all that good treatment, it’s not surprising that some chose to say behind, especially ones who didn’t have good prospects back in the US and UK.

You can’t be both Hindu and Muslim

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Islam and Hinduism’s blurred lines

This BBC news story report on a community in Rajasthan that follow both Hindu and Muslim traditions. They are nominally Hindu, but follow three Muslim practices (circumcision for the newborn male children in the community, eating halal meat and burying their dead). They have done this without conflict for hundreds of years. However, tensions are rising because there is a feeling that one must be one or the other, not both. Consequently, there are people who are “converting” to one faith or another. This is crazy.

Whenever categories are formed, there is always something left over at the end. Geoff Bowker and Susan Leigh Star wrote about this in their book “Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences.” They described the miscellaneous categories as “residual” and they are unavoidable. So this elimination of the hybrid Hindu and Muslim can be seen as an effort to reduce “otherness.” The impetus comes from both outsiders who don’t understand or want to co-opt people to their causes, and from the people themselves out of a desire to reduce ambiguity. It’s often difficult to live with a queer label that challenges basic notions about how the world is organized.

No doubt it’s torture, says U.S. journalist after trying waterboarding

“Christopher Hitchens, a Washington-based journalist known for his support of the Iraq war and the U.S. war on terror, has subjected himself to waterboarding.”

I have often thought about what it would take to convince someone that waterboarding was torture. My idea was to make a video where babies were subject to waterboarding. Of course, some photoshopping would have to be involved.

Then there’s trying it yourself. I didn’t think that anyone would actually try this. Well-known right-wing author and journalist, Christopher Hitchens did. He’s an ardent defender of the war on terror and the Bush administration. After less than 10 seconds on the table, Hitchens now is convinced that waterboarding is torture. Kudos to Hitchens for being brave enough to try it and brave enough to change his mind. His story will appear in the August issue of Vanity Fair.