The Curious Case of Elizabeth Vargas

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate explains:

Does anyone else out there find it strange that the media is treating Elizabeth Vargas' demotion as ABC's nightly news anchor as a complex triple tragedy of tanking ratings, job loss, and pregnancy?

Here is the Washington Post, describing the replacement of a "pregnant woman with an older, more experienced man." Here is the New York Times describing Vargas feeling " 'an enormous amount of sadness' that a job to which she had aspired for sometime had slipped from her grasp." Everywhere, Vargas' pregnancy, her second, is linked to the end of her career.

But—and here's where the story gets sort of interesting—everyone is spectacularly and explicitly clear that Vargas was not forced from behind the anchor's desk; she asked for it: She explains that it's been a "difficult pregnancy" and the doctors have ordered her to ramp it down. She is quoted as saying that, "Every woman has the right to make that decision for herself and her family without anybody judging it. … It's just what's right for me now. … I would hesitate to draw any large conclusions about working women or working mothers."

Of course that is just what everyone is racing to do. We are desperate to draw large conclusions about working women and mothers—our bookshelves are groaning under the weight of those broad conclusions and sweeping theories. So why not use Vargas as a litmus test for it all?

Do you have to, Dahlia? If Vargas is a litmus test "for it all" then are we all supposed to be just like Elizabeth Vargas? For otherwise this makes no sense at all.

Yet this is what I constantly find: womanhood as some sort of a homogeneous substance, kneaded and rolled out into billions of identical gingerbread women. Whatever one woman does is somehow a sign of what all other women will do. Or rather, whatever one woman fails to do somehow proves the failings of all women. We don't treat men like this.

I don't actually think that Dahlia meant the Vargas case to be taken that way, but I wanted to put in all that gingerbread stuff. What she may have meant by the reference to a litmus test is exactly what I despaired over in the previous paragraph: the idea that all women are somehow part of the same homogeneous woman-substance and that one can stand for all in every way.

It's not too farfetched to suggest that Vargas may make different decisions about her career than other women would were they in the same place. On the other hand, Lithwick may have a point if the Vargas demotion is not really a voluntary one but a carefully staged move by the employer who doesn't care for the idea of any pregnant woman as the sole anchor of a serious news program:

Most of the news accounts go to great pains to explain that in fact all this is about bigger things than Vargas' belly: ABC recently slipped into third place in the evening news ratings; the experiment with Vargas and her co-host, Bob Woodruff, as the younger, hipper anchors failed when Woodruff was injured in Iraq and Vargas was left to carry the show all alone; the networks are all bracing for the September descent of Katie Couric at CBS. All plausible. And yet every account also mentions Vargas' looming pregnancy. If this was just a business decision, why cloud it with a great big dogfight about breeding women in the media?

"Why cloud it with a great big dogfight about breeding women in the media?" Because a business decision which consists of demoting a pregnant woman while keeping her injured cohost's seat open indefinitely might not go down with some of the show's audience. It's much nicer if Vargas demotes herself for all the family values.

I called this post "the curious case" because only those negotiating over the deal know what really happened. Was Vargas demoted or did she ask to be demoted? We don't know. But what we do know is that she is going to be replaced by an older man who will not get pregnant any time soon.

We're So Sorry!

Politics is a funny bidness sometimes. For example, when the popularity of a leader plummets he may suddenly have to resort to totally new tactics, such as apologizing for being a macho man. That's what happened to George Bush recently. He and his sidekick Tony Blair gave a press conference with the message "We Are Sorry! So Sorry! Now Like Us Again!", and George took back his famous cowboy statements:

But in an unusual admission of a personal mistake, Mr. Bush said he regretted challenging insurgents in Iraq to "bring it on" in 2003, and said the same about his statement that he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." Those two statements quickly came to reinforce his image around the world as a cowboy commander in chief. "Kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people," Mr. Bush said. "I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner."

What would have been a more sophisticated manner? "Advance upon us, if you may" instead of "bring it on"? No, the problem was not just in what George said but that he also acted in the exact manner those early statements reflect. He saw the war as a cockfight or a computer game. Something without lots of dead civilians, in any case. Where was the necessary foresight or planning? Nowhere, it seems. Foresight and planning are not as macho as photo ops of a president clad in a flightsuit.

At least Blair apologized for an actual policy error:

Mr. Blair, whose approval levels have sunk even lower than Mr. Bush's, said he particularly regretted the broad decision to strip most members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party of their positions in government and civic life in 2003, leaving most institutions in Iraq shorn of expertise and leadership.

You know what? I worried about this before the war had even started, and I'm not especially well informed about Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein's party was the Baath Party it seemed fairly obvious that you had to be a member of it to get any civil service jobs, and that getting rid of all the Baathists would leave the country in anarchy.

Why didn't these two brave leaders of the Free World worry about it any earlier? Did they listen to any experts in the area? Did they ever plan for an occupation longer than a few months?

It's not enough for these two men to come out now and say that they are sorry about the whole mess but that we should help them get out of it. It's not enough, because they are not some semilunatic goddess blogger who has no power over people's lives. They are the people responsible for running vast countries and they should have known better. The costs of their stupid mistakes are mouldering in graves right now and can't hear the belated apologies.

But the press conference wasn't just about apologies. It also contained a little bit more macho huffing and puffing:

Mr. Bush called the terrorists in Iraq "totalitarians" and "Islamic fascists," a phrase he has used periodically to give the current struggle a tinge of the last great American-British alliance, during World War II.

I'd call the terrorists demented madmen, myself, but it's interesting that Bush uses the qualifer "Islamic" when calling the enemy fascist, perhaps to distinguish them from the Christian variety of fascists. And the reference to World War II makes me frightened, because I sometimes think that Bush would like to be remembered as the man who started World War III.

That's enough of a rant for today.

Made in China

Have you noticed how almost everything is now made in China? Check the labels on your clothing and electronics or on your shoes, and the chances are that you have a lot of Chinese stuff around.

I did some retail therapy during my vacation and at one point I started a game of trying to find something made in a country not China. Points were awarded for anything made in, say, Pakistan or Indonesia or even the Northern Mariana Islands. The jackpot was to find something made in the United States. By the end of the day I had found exactly one item of clothing (a leather belt) which was born here in the U.S..

Now, this is interesting. The theory of international trade teaches us that countries should specialize according to their comparative advantage, but it's hard to believe that the Chinese have such an advantage in practically everything. And having most of our consumption goods produced by one foreign country is a tad dangerous. I have these visions of China suddenly refusing to sell us anything (and also refusing to finance our trade deficit). All these Americans running around wearing nothing but leather belts...

But We Are Safer Without Saddam Hussein

News from the great new democracy of Iraq:

The coach of Iraq's tennis team and two players were shot dead in Baghdad on Thursday, said Iraqi Olympic officials.

Coach Hussein Ahmed Rashid and players Nasser Ali Hatem and Wissam Adel Auda were killed in the al-Saidiya district of the capital.

Witnesses said the three were dressed in shorts and were killed days after militants issued a warning forbidding the wearing of shorts.

Kisses, Hugs and Thanks

To my wonderful guest bloggers who did a fantastic job while I caroused and enjoyed the fleshworld more than usually. I raise a toast to Blue Lily, Skylanda, Thistle and Hybrid.

You can enjoy their writing even in the future by clicking on the links above.

Soap Bubbles...

Blogging topics are like that: iridescent soap bubbles leaving a pipe and floating uncertainly upwards until they !pop!. And then they are done. This is the sad aspect of blogging, its ephemerality, and also its good aspect, because the old mistakes are buried in no time at all. But right now I'm more annoyed by the fact that my vacation coincided with some events I wanted to write about, and now it's too late to do so.

For example, the fascinating question about the religious dress code in Iran and what it means to have this particular topic pop up in the Western media right around the time when George Bush wants more ammunition, and how the initial story appears to be false and how that means...what? That we can all sigh in relief because it's just the Iranian women who must follow a strict dress code? Because that specific dress code is an internal matter for the Iranian state, but one which would single out Jews or Christians would not be? Because women are "owned" in some sense? You get the point, and I wanted to make it when the topic was beautifully iridescent and still floating around. Now that it's just a wet patch on some journalist's face my point is lost.

Then there is the story about the Clintons and their marriage, so important that it had to be put on the front page of the New York Times, so important that it had to be commented on extensively by David Broder in the Washington Post who said this about Hillary Clinton:

The two sides of Hillary Rodham Clinton -- the opposites that make her potential presidential candidacy such a gamble -- came into sharp focus Tuesday morning at the National Press Club.

For the better part of an hour, the senator from New York held forth in a disquisition on energy policy that was as overwhelming in its detail as it was ambitious in its reach.

But the buzz in the room was not about her speech -- or her striking appearance in a lemon-yellow pantsuit -- but about the lengthy analysis of the state of her marriage to Bill Clinton that was on the front page of that morning's New York Times.

I'm confused. Are the two sides of Hillary Rodham Clinton her great knowledge base and her lemon-yellow pantsuit or are they her great knowledge base and the question how often she and Bill have sex? Or does she have three opposite sides: intelligence, pantsuits and Bill's penis needs? All of these seem to frighten Broder. It would probably be better to have a female candidate who is not smart or knowledgeable, who wears pinstripes and who has no husband at all. But then these journalists would write about her hidden lesbianism. Oh wait, they already do that with Hillary...

Broder is wading into some no-no areas here, unless he's willing to do a similar analysis of the marriages of male candidates for the job of the president of the United States. And yes, I know that the Clintons' marriage has been fair game for over ten years now, but it's still wrong to respect the privacy of other political marriages while attacking one of them.

Perhaps this isn't a soap bubble, after all. It smells a little different to me, like something from Karl Rove's little arsenal of smears.

Embroidery Blogging

Good enough? That's what it says on the sweater front of the sexywoman/pureangel in this embroidery. The answer is naturally "No". You can click on the picture to see more detail.

Guest Post: One White Dude

With the inexplicably popular novel The Da Vinci Code back on top as the certainly-a-blockbuster movie version comes out, I thought it might be time to look back and wonder, once again, what bothered me so dang much the first time I came across this pretentious mess of second-rate historical revisionism.

At first, I thought it might be the utter lack of any female characters with more depth than the cardboard box I ate last night’s pizza out of – in a novel with almost sickly pretenses of feminist grandeur. But no, that wasn’t really it.

Then I thought it could be the tired (and very well-described) association of imperfect bodies with evil minds – because, as we all know, if you use a cane or can’t sunbathe in June, you must be the scion of satan’s minions, or some other such offensive inanity. But no – as bothersome as that was, that wasn’t really quite the gist of what rubbed me so much the wrong way.

And then I stumbled on it, in the most unlikely of places. Because I can’t seem to stop my Saturday-afternoon trash novel indulgence, I was recently reading John LeCarre’s The Constant Gardener – a novel as far away geographically and philosophically as one can get from Dan Brown, and which yet possesses that same excuse of a plot device that pretends to answer all the questions of the universe: One White Dude. Yes, that’s it – One White Dude.

Without ruining too much of either plot (for those gullible fans among us who haven’t yet ponied up the cash to pay off your library fines and borrow the books – or, god forbid, actually buy one of them: you might want to stop reading now) both novels ultimately find the root of evil in the dullest of places. Both take on the great evils of their realm – the founding lies of the Christian church in the former, the fatal machinations of the industrial-pharmaceutical complex in the latter – and after a couple hundred pages of intrigue and the rising hooded face of evil darkening our doors, what we’re left with is, put simply, One White Dude. One Bad White Dude. As it turns out, it’s not the thousand-year history of the church that foments Dan Brown’s ultimate evil, or the legacy of imperial rule over the black body in Africa that flows from Le Carre’s righteously-angered pen: it’s just One White Dude.

This is rich material. This is the territory of great philosophers and rabid socialists and radical reformers of the status quo hegemonic capitalist-patriarchal establishment. This is the heady stuff from which novelists can turn from mere commentators into shapers of a transformed reality. And yet, neither one managed to cough up more than one pale white man to play fall guy to the corruption of a humanity gone bad.

In other words, I wanted something juicy. I wanted world systems theory and a big hit of post-patriarchal punch wrapped into a novel I could digest between afternoon tea and midnight snack and still be satisfied at breakfast the next morning. But instead of digging into the trove of tarnished treasure and singing out the screaming indictment of human decay, Brown and LeCarre backed down when it counted most. Instead of reaming through the lies and the corruption with the laser-clean cut of diamond through cheap glass, all I got was One White Dude. Who’s the villain? Not post-imperialist capitalism, not hetero-patriarchal cultural appropriation, not hegemonic neo-colonialism, none of that delicious stuff. Just One White Dude.

And therein lies my great disappointment. These are the sorts of authors that pick their topics with just enough acumen to lend them some street cred – but without ever having to do the dirty work of wondering at (never mind actually questioning) the way in which those One White Dudes and their ilk rise to the corrupting power, the way in which those One White Dudes represent something deeper, grander, more powerful, and far more sinister than what’s hidden only inside their own pale skins. Nope, this is what counts as cultural criticism for the masses these days: just One White Dude. And once he’s vanquished…well, there’s nothing left to see here, folks. Move along.

Just don’t trip over that pesky hetero-imperialist hegemon on your way out the theatre door.

An Ounce of Prevention...

Prevention is a good thing, right? The health care system should spend more on prevention. That way we'd save money, prolong lives and avoid pain and suffering. Yes, probably. But sometimes it pays to look at concepts from a different angle, to abstain from the instant emotional reaction and to ask some hard questions, and I feel like doing that with prevention.

Take flossing. Suppose that you floss five minutes a day. That means spending more than a month flossing in the next forty years. Is flossing the best way to spend that month? What if you took the same time and meditated or performed jumping jacks? What are the health benefits of flossing like this?

The point of this example is not that you should stop flossing and grow green moss over your teeth. The point is that prevention also has its costs and sometimes these costs are considerable in time and perhaps also loss of enjoyment. We are told that exercizing is good for health, and it probably is. But is it still good if the person doing the exercizing hates every single minute of it?

There is something puritanical in the American fascination with prevention. If it hurts it must be good for you, so you should eat lots of bran while running around the kitchen and flossing. Then you will live for ever, and if you do not, well, it's your own sinful lifestyle that caused you to die. Sadly, nobody has yet managed to get out of this life alive, and in that sense all prevention is in vain. But we like to pretend that if we only cut out all the fat and the caffeine and the chocolates (!) it just might be possible to live forever. And those who fail to do so must have been bad. Perhaps they had too many hamburgers or eclairs. In any case, they deserved to die.

That puritanical whiff is something I intensely dislike, partly because I'm totally addicted to chocolate, but mostly because it's unbecoming. But prevention has other problems, and one of them is that its costs are rarely addressed. The assumption is that prevention saves money for the health care sector, and it may* do so, or at least some types of prevention do so, but the people doing the prevention will incur costs, both in money (buy dental floss and a skipping rope), time (exercize four hours a week) and psychological adjustments (learn to love cabbage).

And then there is the much bigger problem of establishing when prevention actually works. It's such a nice idea, prevention, that we'd love to just assume that it will always work. But it may not, and only proper medical studies can find out whether certain preventive measures are efficient.

Doing such studies can be difficult. Think about trying to establish whether being physically active reduces depression. If you are depressed you won't feel like being physically active, so finding a correlation between the two doesn't necessarily mean that physical activity causes less moodiness. To establish that one must study people who are not yet depressed, and these people must be randomly divided into two groups, one a control group who is allowed to live as they usually do, and the other a group which is assigned a physical exercize program. Then one must follow the two groups for quite a long time to find out if the depression rates differ. All this is also quite expensive.

Or consider what is sometimes called secondary prevention: the use of screening tests such as mammography to detect illnesses early. The rationale of such screening is that early diagnosis improves the effectiveness of treatment. But does it? Note that it's not enough to find that people who have been diagnosed early appear to live longer with the disease, as this is one obvious consequence of finding out about the illness earlier. Now, mammography has been shown to improve treatment outcomes in breast cancer, but whenever a new screening tool becomes available we should not just assume that it's an improvement.

In any case, prevention is like playing a game of chance. What you try to do is raise the odds that you will live long and happy. But this may not work out. You might run a marathon every day, eat nothing but cabbage and such, and get hit by an SUV during the twentieth mile of your daily run.

Which means that perhaps we should take prevention with a pinch of salt or some laughter. Or some nice dark chocolate.
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*May because people who live a very long time often end up in nursing homes and these are expensive to run.

Voting while disabled

Another guest post from Blue Lily, crossposted at The Gimp Parade:

Today was election day in my small town. There were only three school bond proposals to decide and unfortunately they don't have a chance in hell of passing, but I went to vote just the same. Because I can. I turned down the absentee ballot option because I wanted to go vote at the poll and I was sure access here, at this time, wouldn't be a problem.

With September primaries quickly coming up, the fiasco of Florida's hanging chads still haunting election judges everywhere, and the requirements to provide fully accessible voting for all varieties of disabled people, there's a considerable amount of voting angst among public officials and private citizens who keep up on voting issues.

HAVA, the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, requires that every polling place in the country provide a voting system that persons with disabilities can use independently and privately. Much voting for disabled people has been known to occur at a table in public, with one or two poll workers assisting with the voting procedure. This system lacks privacy and provides no way for blind citizens to know if the poll workers truly marked the ballot as instructed.

Enter the machines. Since HAVA means every voting district in the country needs some way to meet federal requirements, many business opportunities sprouted for manufacturers of electronic voting machines. But acquiring voting machines that satisfy disability access, voter trust, and accuracy has been a nightmare for voting officials around the country. Citizens are suing the states for better set-ups, states are suing the companies manufacturing the machines for failures of all kinds, and September looks closer than ever.

It seems certain that disabled voters will be the ones to bear the brunt of this problem. In New York City, there will be just five polling places where disabled people can hope to find total access this fall. That's one polling site in each borough for a population of people largely dependent on public transportation that doesn't do well accommodating them either.

One solution to this whole mess that seems to be gaining currency is voting by mail. Absentee voting is being expanded to "permanent" absentee voting and then to "no excuse" absentee balloting and voting by mail for all. Many claim it's a much better system and supposedly many disabled people would prefer to always vote by mail.

I think it's a bad idea. Oh, it might be smart in the short-term while the numerous problems with voting are minimized, but in the long-term it's maybe bad for democracy and certainly bad for the disabled. If the solution to problems of accessibility is to not require anyone to show up, then all the churches and rec centers and other polling sites that are not currently accessible will have less pressure to become so. And all the poll workers who will be trained on how to interact with disabled people to help them vote will never be trained. And all the disabled people who rarely get out of the house because of Medicare homebound laws* and lack of transportation, will have one less reason to interact with the world. All this equals less accessibility and freedom for the disabled in the long-run.

Additionally, I believe the assurance of maximizing privacy and actual casting of the votes disabled people choose themselves can only happen at polling sites. This may be true for many women as well, if they are in coercive relationships. A private vote taken at a public place ensures society's most vulnerable citizens the freedom to make their own political decisions. Should disabled persons require human assistance to vote after all, at least it is legally required that someone impartial -- or two people, one from each party -- assist. If privacy must be sacrificed in any way, as it most certainly will be for many severely disabled people if everyone votes by mail, there should be neutrality built into the assistance.

Of course, voting that discriminates against the disabled hasn't been resolved even with the ADA being 16 years old. There's no reason to expect any future public outcry about voting by mail -- if there is one -- will center on the rights of disabled persons now. But there are other reasons it remains a bad idea.

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*From an article at New Mobility (italics mine): In 2002, at the 10-year anniversary of the ADA implementation... President Bush (announced), "Today Medicare recipients who are considered homebound may lose coverage if they go to a baseball game--which, of course, I encourage them to do--or meet with a friend or go to a family reunion. So today I announce we're clarifying Medicare policy. So people who are considered homebound can occasionally take part in their communities without fear of losing their benefits."

Victory for gay parents in Washington State courts stands

The U.S. Supreme Court has just declined to hear arguments in a case that I think is worth noting, about the rights of gay parents who separate from their child's biological parent. The Boston Globe has a good story on the case here, which expresses what the legal issues in the case are more clearly than some of the other articles out there, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a story with some additional details here. Essentially, while the two parties were a couple, Britain conceived a child through artificial insemination. Carvin stayed home to care for their daughter after she was born; the child called her Mama. When the couple split up in 2001, Britain refused to allow Carvin to see the child. (She also, in an unusual twist, married the sperm donor, referred to in the articles as a "gay friend" of the couple). Carvin went to court; while the articles don't clarify exactly what rights she sought, the Washington Supreme Court held that she could try to prove that her connection to the child was such that despite the lack of a biological relationship she could try to prove that she was her de facto parent, her parent in everything but blood, a status that would entitle her to parental rights.

Britain argued in response that the Washington court's ruling interfered with her constitutional right to make decisions for her daughter; it's that argument that the Supreme Court has recently declined to hear, allowing the lower court's ruling to stand. Her attorney says the following (in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer):

"I think it's inevitable the Supreme Court is going to take one of these cases," said Jordan Lorence, who represented Britain for the Alliance Defense Fund. "There is nothing that says family law is exempt from federal constitutional scrutiny."

My initial reaction is to say that the constitutional argument here is relatively weak, but I imagine that it's true that the Supreme Court will eventually hear one of these cases. It is worth noting, though, that it can't rewrite Washington's family law unless it finds it to be unconstitutional, which in my opinion would be extreme under the circumstances.

I think the Washington court reached the right result. Britain's attorney engages in some mild scaremongering on the topic, as follows:

They argued that the Washington ruling opened the door for all kinds of people -- from live-in boyfriends to roommates -- to claim parental rights.

"Under the court's ruling, a child could have an unlimited number of parents," said Britain's Seattle attorney, Kristen Waggoner.

I have to admit, the possibilities here do not strike me as all that frightening. First, seeing a woman who was partnered with the child's mother and was the child's primary caretaker until she reached the age of 7 as a de facto parent doesn't appear really lead to a conclusion that a parent's roommate--who didn't participate in the decision to conceive the child and hasn't acted as a parent or occupied the role of a parent in the child's life--would also be treated as a de facto parent. I'm also not especially phased by the idea that a child could have (gasp!) more than two parents. In fact, I think that recognizing the possibility that for some children more than two adults do play parental roles might usefully clarify some aspects of family law.

But most importantly, I think that the core of the ruling is correct. I don't believe that blood should be our only touchstone for parenthood. Barbara Bennett Woodhouse has written, in a slightly different context, that “at a time when children are suffering no shortage of begetting but face a serious shortage of care, our laws on fathering consistently place small value on nurturant, interdependent conduct, and instead overvalue ownership through procreation.”* She uses the Dr. Suess story of Horton hatching the egg to suggest that the act of fathering a child shouldn't grant absolute parental rights in the absence of care and effort--but care and effort should lead to some right to continued involvement in a child's life, genetics notwithstanding. My work with domestic violence victims--which has often taken the form of fighting against granting biological fathers visitation or custody--has convinced me that common genes aren't enough to make a person a parent. And my friendships with gay and lesbian men and women who are, or will be, parents to children to whom they aren't related--as well as my strong relationships with my stepparents on both sides of my family--show me that family isn't adequately defined by our genes.

*Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, Hatching the Egg: A Child-Centered Perspective on Parents’ Rights, 14 CARDOZO L. REV. 1747 (1993). Again, sorry I don't have a link.

And now for something completely different...

Another guest blogger reporting in with a post that isn't political unless you're involved in disability rights issues and take this sort of thing personally. My name is Kay Olson, though I often go by Blue Lily online, and I've cross-posted this entry at The Gimp Parade where it normally belongs. I'd planned on sharing some post-deadline Medicare Part D blues for the Audience of the Goddess, but frankly the whole drug plan is so assinine and byzantine that there are aspects I don't understand enough to write about. Hopefully next week. Until then, a little pop culture critique:

Just over a year ago, I wrote about Dan Brown's piece of literary genius that is The Da Vinci Code, and since the movie is opening this weekend to packed audiences now seems a worthwhile time to refer back to how both literature and Hollywood use disabled people for dramatic purposes. I haven't seen the film, but already know from the trailer that the book's damaging stereotypes remain intact.

Once again I warn: to understand disability stereotypes and simply apply the most likely one here is to make your own spoiler for the story. If that bothers you -- look away now.

There are two disabled characters in Brown's story and -- surprise! -- they are both the villains. One has polio:

The villain isn't disabled so much as "crippled." Crippled. Crippled. Did I mention he is crippled? Well, Brown does. Over and over and over as Mr. Crippled Secret Villain limps around and other characters comment on the fact that he is crippled. This is to make sure that the densest reader understands that twisted on the outside means twisted on the inside. Why is he a villain? Because he's crippled and that can drive a person to be not nice.

This need to establish a certain hinkiness to the character of Teabing not only makes it into the film, it's in the trailer. "What can an old cripple do for you?" Pretty much Ian McClellen's first lines. Also in the trailer, there's a moment where Teabing drops his crutches to lunge and grab an artifact/clue out of the air. While this can be seen as a show of how important the mystery is to Teabing, it's also iconic of the idea that disabled people might be faking their impairments and making fools of everyone. This able-bodied anxiety is part of the stereotypes too, and cleverly, Teabing gets to be like those of us who are actually disabled and living with impairments yet also subject to frequent suspicion about our true identities.

The second villain is an albino man played in the film by Paul Bettany. I mentioned the albinism in my review a year ago, but didn't give poor Silas fair attention. Luckily, Andrew Leibs at Ragged Edge provides the historical context of albinism's stereotypical treatment.

Readers will no doubt recall the stalking Silas, who executes four people in one night doing God's work. Most of the stereotypes common to books and films that exploit albinism are present: red eyes, loyalty that leads to self mutilation and an abusive past that spawns a born-again brutality and proficiency in killing.

It is impossible for one with albinism (most of us detest the dehumanizing word "albino") to read Brown's book and not feel diminished. Knowing that Silas is the only experience most people will ever have with albinism is deeply troubling. Such characters take root in the imagination where there are no positive human images to balance them and thereby they assume great power.

I disagree with Leibs that Silas is the "only" albino experience that most of the nondisabled public will have, but he's dead-on about the depressingly consistent characterization. For an astounding list of how characters with albinism are portrayed, look here. Evil, they are, the pale Satans of Hollywood!

In writing this I learned that albinism creates vision problems and people with this condition are considered legally blind. Isn't it interesting though, how portrayals of evil albinos (all those I can rcall) don't include any pesky vision problems that would hinder their ability to terrorize normal people? Too bad evil albino characters aren't played by actors with albinism. Even if they had to act sighted (and presumably get the same acclaim sighted actors get for acting blind), at least they could sort of represent.

But then, disabled characters aren't meant to be acted by disabled people. That would ruin the Oscar race for all the able-bodied actors. It's no accident that Ian McClellan doesn't have any actual need for crutches and Paul Bettany has real no pigmentation issues. Not that this film is Oscar material if most reviews are accurate descriptions. But really, why take a chance?

Fathers and Family Law

The American Coalition for Fathers and Families (apologists for domestic violence, as well as advocates for "reform" of the family law system to provide "equal rights" to fathers) is stumping for a new law in North Dakota, as detailed in this article from the Grand Forks Herald (courtesy of an internet friend from ND). The law's backers are currently seeking signatures sufficient for a statewide vote on two measures seeking to change family law in the state. As I said in my previous post, I've practiced family law as a student attorney in Massachusetts for the last two years, spending 20 hours per week or more at it--and so this is something that I know something about. And given the nature of my organization's practice, which served primarily battered women, I find the ND proposals upsetting. And, also, angering.

Both measures would "require that parents go through mediation to come up with a 'family plan' where children would be split between two households." Which is, in itself, of questionable merit, since joint custody truly doesn't work for every family--and mediation is absolutely inappropriate in any divorce or custody dispute in which violence or coercion has been a hallmark of the relationship. The proposals are similar enough that I'm focusing, here, on the proposal that's more detailed (and therefore more extreme--so it's fair to note here that the American Coalition for Fathers and Families has focused its support on the less extreme proposal) which has the following provisions:

One measure, touted by Roland Riemers of Emerado, N.D., would require couples to have a prenuptial agreement before marriage, limit child support payments after divorces and eliminate penalties for parents who refuse to make them. Riemers, who has filed more than a dozen North Dakota Supreme Court appeals on his two divorces and related disputes, put in a bid for North Dakota governor in 2004.

I enjoy how the paper includes a description of Mr. Riemers' personal history with the family court system in its discussion of his proposal, making him look like a total nut driven by malice against his ex-wife. Not that I can assert that he is any such thing, of course. But while on the topic--and without, quite seriously, making any accusation against him specifically--I will note that using the courts to harass women is a common behavior of batterers. I saw this in my cases, and it's born out in the research available on this topic as well. For example, studies show that batterers are more than twice as likely as other fathers to contest custody at all.* In my cases, I saw fathers contest custody (when they clearly didn't want it, were not equipped to have a child live with them, and were not going to succeed in getting custody) fight for visitation (and then not visit, because all they really wanted was to assert the *right* to visit) and refuse to pay child support (when they were perfectly capable of paying).

Which brings me to the merits of Mr. Reimers' proposal. The first requirement--that couples have a pre-nup--sounds innocuous but may well not be. The article is somewhat unclear, but given the context of these proposals, which are meant to change how child custody is decided, I presume that the prenups contemplated would deal with child custody as well, rather than with division of the couple's assets. It is clearly outrageous to suggest that a couple should decide before marriage and before the birth of their children how they will jointly divide custody of their (imaginary) children at the time of their (imaginary, and from unknown causes) divorce. It's also outrageous to suggest that such an agreement would be enforceable. What about the woman who marries the "great guy" who turns out to abuse her? Is she bound by the agreement that she made to let her kids sleep at his 3 out of 7 nights now that she knows that, while there, they'll be exposed to his violence against his new wife? Notably, Mr. Reimers has anticipated this scenario:

The measure proposed by Riemers specifically indicates that no child should be kept from a parent based on a domestic violence protection order unless there's clear and convincing evidence that shows the parent poses a threat to the child.

This ignores, of course, vast bodies of evidence showing that domestic violence does, by definition, pose a threat to children; first, children may be actually harmed when it occurs even if they're not its target; second, they are often targeted, since one good way to hurt a woman is to hurt her children; and finally, they suffer emotionally, behaviorally, academically, as a result of exposure to domestic violence even if they aren't actually harmed. Also notably, batterers are not great parents; they tend to be uninvolved with their children's care, they tend to use their children as weapons against the other parent, and thanks to the frequency of their recidivism, there is a real risk that their continued involvement with their children will lead to the children's exposure to further violence.**

Beyond the problems with requiring parents to decide the custody of their prospective children pre-marriage, prenups deciding issues having to do with children generally are problematic. In Massachusetts, there are very strict rules for when a parental agreement regarding child support can be enforced--briefly, it has to be fair in light of Massachusetts child support law, not signed under coercion, and approved by a court. There are good reasons for these requirements--first, the lack of such guidelines is an invitation to batterers to coerce women into signing agreements regarding child support. But secondly, child support is not meant to support either spouse after a divorce (that's what division of property and alimony are all about). It's meant to support children, and so we don't allow either parent to bargain away their children's rights.

Of course, under Mr. Reimers' proposal, children wouldn't have all that many rights, since child support payments would be lowered and would be, essentially, voluntary. Having gone on this long already, I have almost nothing to say about that. It's interestingly different from the complaint you hear from many fathers, that if they do pay child support they should be entitled to visitation, to joint custody, to any one of a number of rights they feel they have (or alternatively, that if they're denied said entitlements, they shouldn't have to pay child support). I have things to say about that argument--there are plenty of reasons that we don't tie child support and visitation together. But this proposal preserves the distinction between child support and visitation, while saying that noncustodial parents should be able to just not pay--and at that point, where the argument is the raw assertion that parents shouldn't have to support their children, I don't think the argument merits my time.

A final note--I've talked here largely about fathers and mothers, because that's how these debates are typically framed (there's a reason that it's not the Coalition for Non-custodial parents and children) and because gender does play a role in these discussions, and I don't see any point in obscuring that fact. I don't want to imply, however, that these roles are fixed, that women are never abusive or that men are never great custodial parents. My father was a great custodial parent, for one thing, so I know that isn't the case.


*Peter Jaffe et al., Domestic Violence and High-Conflict Divorce: Developing a New Generation of Research for Children, in DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN THE LIVES OF CHILDREN 189, 193 supra note 9 (citing J. Bowermaster & D. Johnson, The Role of Domestic Violence in Family Court Child Custody Determinations: An Interdisciplinary Investigation, Presented at the Fourth International Conference on Children Exposed to Family Violence, San Diego (1998) and J. Zorza, How Abused Women Can Use the Law to Protect their Children, in ENDING THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE 147 (E. Peled ed, 1995). (Excuse the academic citation--I cited this study in a paper I wrote recently but don't have a link to it).
**See generally LUNDY BANCROFT & JAY G. SILVERMAN, THE BATTERER AS PARENT: ADDRESSING THE IMPACT OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ON FAMILY DYNAMICS 5-7 (2002). This is a very well-researched and useful book--that is to say, it was useful to me in writing my 3L paper, and is one of few to focus on how batterers parent rather than on how battered women parent.

Guest post: Weekend warriors on the front lines

There are so, so many things wrong with Bush's plan to send 6000 National Guard troops to fortify the border. Ya know, xenophobia, racism...not to mention the utter lack of gratitude toward immigrants that do the bulk of the grunt work in the agriculture and service industries that allow the rest of us to pay prices far below what the market would charge if we actually paid a living wage for those products and services.

But all that's been said better than I can say it. The one thing that people don't seem to acknowledge about this plan is the effect on the National Guard members who will be called up to serve - and to serve in the dead of summer in the desert, if this plan gets off the ground anytime soon. Bush treats the National Guard as disposable help, as his personal hand-servants to be dispatched and recalled for further orders as he personally sees fit. The news outlets don't seem too inclined to mention the disrupted lives of Guard members unless it's to repeat tear-jerking stories of vets disabled in Iraq. And while those are compelling stories, sometimes it's the more mundane stories that make up the bulk of the impact: reduced income that was supporting a family, time out of school that sets students back a semester or two, missed promotions from being called away from work.

Every woman and man in the Guard signed up for this and knows that they will be called when they are needed for the protection of the country. And they have been called and have served - in Iraq, in New Orleans, in emergencies across the nation. But - to steal a line from Michael Moore - it is in honor of this sacrifice that the nation owes it to them to use their services judiciously, to call on them only with the utmost care, to be sure that when we do need them (especially as hurricane season and wildfire season are upon us again) these women and men can bring the energy and dedication needed to perform under the direst circumstances, such as on the Gulf Coast last summer. With so much of the Guard deployed to Iraq and an ever-increasing number of vets who have now come home from a year or more in the Middle East, sending 6000 of them into the desert for a few months is an unnecessary strain on an already stressed system - and a call to sacrifice that abuses the promises that the National Guard members have made to our nation.

For that reason on top of the myriad reasons why fortifying the border is poor excuse for diplomatic and domestic policy, the Guard should not be called up for Bush's pet project. If we use these resources too many times, they will not be there when they are really needed.

Guest Post: Crisis, Period

I have often wondered what the world would look like if women's bodies were considered Normal, just like that, with a capital N. You know, the way men's bodies are treated by everyone, especially the medical establishment. I don't know what that would be like, but I know for sure that such a world would not allow for the kind of health crisis facing the women of Zimbabwe - the lack of access to adequate, affordable, and sanitary menstrual protection.

As Ellie Levenson writes in Periods: the final frontier, the supply of disposable pads and tampons dramatically decreased when production of these items moved from Zimbabwe to South Africa. Disposables are outrageously expensive. There is a a lack of materials for cloth pads. And knowledge about traditional methods of dealing with menstruation has been lost over time. At best, this effectively prohibits girls and women from participating in their normal activities when they are menstruating. At worst, using newspapers or other unsatisfactory substitutes results more vaginal infections, which in turn increases women's risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. (Note: The next link contains a glib and graphic descrition of a sexual assault. Please click with caution.) The Sunday Times reported that the life expectancy of Zimbabwean women is expected to decrease from an already abyssmal 34 to "as low as 20." Women who had the temerity to protest were beaten, imprisoned, and sexually assaulted.

The Dignity.Period! campaign was established by Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA) to raise money to purchase and distribute pads and tampons to the women who need them.

When you consider the situation for refugees all over the world, it gets even worse. Among the many other issues (rape, prostitution, and invisibility of women to aid agencies are among the most significant) that Ruth Marshall covers in her 1995 article,Refugees, feminine plural, she has some damning words from aid workers:

"I went once on a high-powered inter-agency mission - five men and me - to former Yugoslavia," confides [Marie] Lobo, [UNHCR's Senior Social Services Officer]. "And we went around and asked if there were any problems, and everyone said no. And I said 'Wait, let me talk to the women'. And the issues came up. No sanitary towels. No proper, private bathing space to wash. Gynecological problems. No underwear. These were things they had never said. Talking about underwear to a man - of course, they'd never said it. So we insisted that sanitary towels be put in family packs, along with underwear and other personal items. I kept insisting - 'This is routine, they have to have it.' Our male colleagues made a fuss. 'Imagine opening up a family pack and finding sanitary towels!' they said. As if it were something horrifying, something outrageous - not something completely normal."

Family packs in Yugoslavia do now contain sanitary towels. But many staffers are far from satisfied with the gains made to date. "If you raise the question of sanitary towels, you get little embarrassed giggles and they trivialize the whole issue," [Senior Coordinator for Refugee Women, Ann] Howarth-Wiles says.

(Bolds mine.) And so we have two complimentary crises - the shortage itself and its affect on the health and well-being of women, and the difficulty of getting anyone to pay attention to the problem. I suppose that is to be expected, since it not only affects women, and marginalized women, at that, but solving the crisis in Zimbabwe requires actually thinking and talking about the dreaded menstrual period. Can't you just feel the shock and horror? (Incidentally, why don't all family packs everywhere contain sanitary products? Oh that's right...men might have to look at them, and we can't have that, now, can we?)

On a more positive note, though, the group blog This is Zimbabwe has a good entry on this topic, and another one that includes some suggestions for how to help.

I can only hope that one day, the whole idea of such a crisis will seem far-fetched. And not because of taboos that prevent us from discussing it, but because women's bodies will actually treated with human dignity, period.

Vacation Posting

Should be banned by the health care authorities of this country. The next two posts were written by me while on vacation and while my mother was impatiently tapping her shoe to get me going. Which is a long way of saying that I had not read the original report but only the Washington Post article take on it when I wrote those posts.

And I have to eat some of my words because the report is not that bad. It stresses the health of the women as well and not just the potential health of their future potential fetuses, and it also emphasizes the importance of planning pregnancies. But the quote from the Washington Post article which initially made me so angry, this one:

New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.

Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.

While most of these recommendations are well known to women who are pregnant or seeking to get pregnant, experts say it's important that women follow this advice throughout their reproductive lives, because about half of pregnancies are unplanned and so much damage can be done to a fetus between conception and the time the pregnancy is confirmed.

is still a fair summary of what the report says.

A little background for my anger. In the early 1990s a very similar report appeared and the language of that recommendation was almost exactly like the above quote. This meant that I assumed the current report to match the tone of the earlier one. It doesn't, not quite, but it isn't complete light and loveliness, either.

As I already noted the report does address the health of the fertile women themselves but the term "preconception care" is a most unfortunate one, especially for those women who are in their late forties and looking towards menopause rather than any more pregnancies, and while almost all the detailed proposals in the report are about situations where women may quite reasonably become pregnant the overall argument is that preconception care should apply to all women in their fertile years, including those who never plan to be pregnant, those who are not partnered and those who have finished their childbearing. Or rather, the existence of such groups of women among the fertile age group is mostly ignored in the report. It also ignores preconception planning for men but perhaps that is something that will appear in a separate recommendation around Father's Day.

And I'm still unhappy with the idea that all fertile women should live as if they might become pregnant tomorrow, even if they have no plans to have children any time soon. Consider alcohol. Drinking some red wine can be good for your heart but bad for an embryo. Should all women abstain from alcohol consumption, even at some risk to their own health? Or take a more serious question: What happens when a medical treatment a fertile-age woman needs might also harm a potential fetus? Is the recommendation that the woman should suffer without the treatment, even if she has no plans of becoming pregnant? These are not idle questions.

Most "preconception care" health advice contributes to the health of both the woman and any future baby she might have. But what happens when this is not the case? How seriously are we to interpret the idea of pre-pregnancy, in other words?

Then put all this into the context of the recent assaults on abortion rights and the likely future contraception wars, already brewing in the pro-life groups. It's hard not to feel that potentially always pregnant is the only possible state for most women in the dystopian future, and seeing this viewpoint in a medical report, well, it does things to my emotional buttons.

That's all.

More On The Next Post

I am so angry at this particular topic that I may not have been as clear as I wanted to be and I didn't get all the arguments into that one post. So here are a few more things:

Consider the following societal problem: We have too many car accident deaths because of drunk driving. What should we do about this? Whose behavior should we affect?

If we applied the same logic as in the recommendations which label all fertile women pre-pregnant we would regard all people who drink as potential drunk drivers, and the only solution would be to advise nobody to drink. After all, when people get drunk they may grab the wheel of the car without having planned to do so and then they may turn the key and start the car and hit a pedestrian who then dies. Clearly, we can't let the drinkers decide for themselves not to drive, because driving may be unplanned. By extension of the same argument, drinking at any time might result in a situation where unplanned drunk driving might happen.

If we wish to reduce traffic fatalities only one recommendation is valid: Nobody should drink. Ever. It might be helpful to view every person as potentially drunk-driving when we sell this recommendation to the citizens of the United States.

How do you like it? The level of intervention here is about the same as in the recommendation about women's behavior in the actual government proposal. I'm sure that it would be opposed as far too wide-reaching. Nothing appears too wide-reaching when it comes to women and fertility, though.

My traffic proposal would also be resisted on the grounds that we can't just recommend no drinking for all sorts of people who are totally innocent of any drunk driving. But note that this argument doesn't seem to apply to women. Women are assumed to be pre-pregnant, whatever they themselves say or whatever precautions they may be taking.

Some might also argue that my traffic proposal has high costs in terms of causing millions of light drinkers unhappiness from abstaining from a few glasses of wine a week for very little benefit. Suppose that the actual group of people who are likely to drive drunk is a lot smaller than the general group of all drinkers, and suppose that we could find some way of identifying that group and of affecting its behavior directly. Wouldn't that be a lot more effective as a social policy?

The answer is yes, but clearly when the same argument is applied to women the answer is no. It doesn't seem to matter how much unhappiness we would cause millions of women if they all obeyed the pre-pregnancy rules, even if most of this unhappiness turned out to be totally wasted in the sense that the woman does not get pregnant after all. And it doesn't seem to matter that the proposal doesn't really address the true reasons for high infant mortality rates, just as my proposal probably would do very little in combating drunk driving, especially as it's just a recommendation. The true reasons are in the lack of proper antenatal care in this country and in poverty and its corollaries.

Someone pointed out that the government recommendations are just that, recommendations, and that women can simply ignore them. True. But what these government recommendations tell us, clear as a bell, is that this government does not respect women as full human beings and does not treat women as full human beings or as human beings of independent worth.

The Care And Maintenance of the Aquarium

The Washington Post honors the recently passed Mother's Day by a most interesting article on the health of the newborn:

New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.

Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.

While most of these recommendations are well known to women who are pregnant or seeking to get pregnant, experts say it's important that women follow this advice throughout their reproductive lives, because about half of pregnancies are unplanned and so much damage can be done to a fetus between conception and the time the pregnancy is confirmed.

Are you prepared for this, ladies between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five? You are now in the state of pre-pregnancy! Like a lovely empty aquarium, which needs to be kept ready for any goldfish someone might slip into it. It is not really your own health that concerns your physician, no. It's the potential health of any potential fetus that somehow might appear in your uterus. You must keep your uterus healthy. You should maintain a healthy weight not because it's good for your heart but because it's good for some future imaginary fetus. And these instructions apply to every single woman theoretically able to get pregnant, including nuns. It. Does. Not. Matter. If. The. Woman. Does. Not. Plan. To. Have. Children. Any. Time. Soon. Or. Even. Ever. Because women can't decide for themselves, you know. And because potential future children are much more important than already existing women. And because women exist for the purpose to breed children, just as aquaria exist for the goldfish.

So, my dear aquaria, remember these easy steps: Your boyfriends and husbands and other potential inseminators can do whatever they please: smoke, drink, take up hazardous jobs. But you are the precious aquarium in which their goldfish will one day swim and as nobody knows exactly when they will slip the fish in you better be always prepared. Like a new kind of girl scout.

Or like the women in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Those women also were urged to eat healthy foods, to exercize and to refrain from smoking and drinking, because they were handmaids: women intended for the breeding of babies. Atwood's book is about a dystopia. It's a little frightening that we have something slightly similar in a government recommendation today, with the difference that our program is still voluntary. For how long it will stay that way remains to be seen.

The reactions in the lefty blogosphere have largely been like mine: shock and fear. Later on I will spell out very clearly why I felt both shock and fear, but some of the reasons have been better stated elsewhere. The Broadsheet, for example, comments on the real reasons for the high infant mortality rates in the United States and how the recommendations of this report largely ignore those: poverty and no access to the health care system:

But that's because we have a sick and failing healthcare system that leaves millions of disadvantaged Americans without anything resembling the care they require. Almost 17 million women lack health insurance.

Pretending that we're going to solve this problem by instituting guidelines that treat women as baby incubators is not the solution. All it does is reinforce an attitude that problems women have with reproduction are the only ones worth worrying about. How about federal recommendations about using birth control to prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases? How about federal guidelines that require doctors to talk to women about the dangers smoking, poor nutrition, unprotected sex, drug use, lack of exercise, and heavy drinking can pose for them, and not just their precious potential cargo?

Dressing up this "pre-conception care" crap -- which is supposed to be administered by every doctor a woman sees, from her G.P. to her gynecologist, perhaps even her podiatrist -- as "a reproductive health plan" to help women shut out of the healthcare system doesn't track.

Even the report itself notes that women who already cannot afford to see a doctor -- the ones whose pregnancies are compromised by poor or nonexistent prenatal care -- aren't likely to be able to get their "pre-pregnancy care" either, since obstacles to this "include getting insurance companies to pay for visits."

No, mostly this sounds like an Orwellian language trick played by the healthcare authorities, letting you know why your health as a woman really matters.

And Stunt Woman in the comments section of this Eschaton post on the same topic concisely states the unfairness of these recommendations by rephrazing them to apply to men:

New federal guidelines ask all males capable of ejaculation to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as active studs, regardless of whether they plan to impregnate a female or donate sperm in the near future.

Among other things, this means all men after their first ejaculation should refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight, keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control, avoid known mutagens such as caffeine, and keep their scrotum from extremes of temperature.

Ejaculating men are also urged to avoid participating in sports with fast moving projectiles or other objects which might injure their testicles and cause their sperm to mutate.

When it's put this way the horror of the proposal becomes considerably clearer. Men are never asked to consider themselves as the potential purveyors of healthy goldfish for women's aquaria. Even though medical evidence shows that sperm quality can be affected by workplace exposure to toxins and by smoking and drinking.

Not all commenters on the government recommendations view them with my reactions. Some men think the ideas are good ones, possibly because they are not asked to modify forty years of their own lives for the sake of two or three pregnancies during those four decades. I also got the impression that most of those who viewed the proposal favorably assumed that "preconception care" applies to only those few months when a couple tries to get pregnant. That's not what the government recommendations state. All women are assumed to be either pre-pregnant or pregnant from menarche to menopause. Aquaria, in other words.

I find these recommendations frightening. They really taste like the Handmaid's Tale to me, they taste like scorn to women as human beings, they taste like contempt towards women's ability to plan their own lives. Women have been made into tools for the purpose of giving birth to babies, and now women are to live their lives as tools. That the goal of the recommendations is a laudable one doesn't change any of this. Human beings are not to be regarded as mere tools, not even for the purpose of saving other human beings.

And consider the tradeoffs that the government has decided to find worthwhile: To have all fertile women on their toes all the time, for the sake of future and currently nonexisting fetuses, but to say nothing about the things that fertile men should do. To seriously recommend that a woman keeps herself superfit for pregnancy from the age of fifteen to the age of fifty-five. To recommend that she stays away from lead paint and cat feces and jobs that can be hazardous for developing fetuses, and not just when she is planning to become pregnant and during pregnancy, but every single month of those forty years! What this means, for example, is that no fertile women should have cats as pets, and soon it might mean that no fertile women can work in certain industries. And every woman should buy folic acid supplements for forty years (add up how much that costs), because it has been shown that it's impossible to get the necessary amount of folic acid for the prevention of birth defects from a good diet alone. Then add the mercury in fish and it might well be a bad idea for any fertile woman to eat fish. Forget about drinking, even if a glass of red wine might be good for your heart. Alcohol is not advised for pregnant women and now all women are potentially pregnant.

The assumption these recommendations make is that no woman can control her own fertility, even if she takes oral contraceptives, even if she is unpartnered, even if she is a nun in a convent. And why does the government assume this? Because roughly one half of all pregnancies are unplanned. This does NOT mean that every woman has a fifty percent chance of unplanned pregnancies, but it's easier for the government to ignore that. Once women are viewed as aquaria a lot of steps become easy.

Is it really necessary to regard us as fish tanks? Suppose that we make a very radical assumption: that physicians should care for women for the sake of their own health. What might happen if we took this unprecedented step? Can I make a guess? The women would also be healthy for any future pregnancies! But I keep forgetting that it makes no sense to talk about the health of aquaria, only of the fish in them, and the only cause of ill health in those goldfish is naturally the aquarium.

How many million fertile women are there in this country? Estimate the cost of providing all the necessary behavior modifications so that each of them becomes a pristine aquarium. That would be a very large amount of money. What if we spent the same amount of money in a different way: By buying health insurance coverage for poor women who currently have none and by starting antenatal clinics in poor areas.

Which do you think would save more infant lives? I'd be willing to bet the latter does, because the U.S. infant mortality rate is high largely because of the high mortality rate in poor and largely black areas. Why not focus the resources first to the neediest areas, by making sure that the women who are planning to get pregnant or who are currently pregnant have access to good care? Why are we doing the exact reverse, by redefining pregnancy as something all women are almost falling into? Consider that the average woman has somewhere around two children during those forty years, and it is fairly clear that for the vast majority of those forty years she is not pre-pregnant and it's really quite inane to treat her that way: like an aquarium.

Domestic Violence Now

When I was trying to decide what to write about for Echidne during this week, I happened to stumble across this short article, from the Boston Globe. There is very little in the article that isn’t essentially good news. It details how Massachusetts legislators are talking about passing tougher domestic violence laws, in response to a new report:

A report released Friday by the Legislature's Public Safety Committee called on officials to find better ways to assess how potentially dangerous an abuser might be and to create a statewide notification system for victims if abusers are released from custody.

These would both be good things—actually, I was a little bit shocked to realize that the state isn’t already notifying battered women when their abusers are released from custody.

Nonetheless, the article left me vaguely irked. And on reflection, the source of my irritation is the same as that of my surprise at the nature of the suggested changes. That is, I’m so frustrated that this is still where we are. We’re still passing laws intended to keep women from being killed. (Or, Massachusetts is. As the article notes, Massachusetts already has relatively strong laws in this area, since it’s recognized the basic concept that not killing women = good.) Even the quote in the article from an activist against domestic violence rubbed me the wrong way:

Mary Lauby, executive director of Jane Doe Inc., an anti-domestic violence group, called the proposals "an important first step."
"Victims of domestic violence continue to be murdered," she said. "More than 10 children lost mothers in the past month. Where is the outrage?"

When she says “an important first step,” it still sounds to me like, “an important first step to helping women to stay alive.” She’s still focused—as are the proposals detailed in the article—on how we restrain batterers from committing acts of violence. When we talk about what happens after the violence, I don’t know.

I will be graduating from law school this June. For the past two years, I’ve spent 20 hours per week (more or less, and often much more) doing what is essentially pro bono work as a student attorney. While the organization that I worked with has several focus areas, I primarily handled family law cases for victims of domestic violence. I saw first-hand the aftereffects of violence—poverty, depression, trauma, and lengthy and intrusive court battles over everything possible—child support, custody, visitation—all used quite deliberately by batterers in order to make sure that their victims can’t move on. There are resources available for victims of domestic violence. There are social workers available through various hospitals in my area, for example. And Massachusetts has made huge (and relatively unique) reforms to the way that its Department of Social Services interacts with battered women when investigating accusations of child abuse or neglect (necessary since child abuse and woman abuse often occur in the same households and are perpetrated by, or arise indirectly from the actions of, the same men). There is the welfare system, complete with the nightmarish restrictions that the Clinton administration gave poor people when signing off on Welfare Reform in 1996 (interesting fact: also in 1996, Congress restricted Legal Services funding—which has historically been the backbone of poverty law litigation—so that, among other things, organizations receiving that funding couldn’t challenge the Welfare Reform rules). There are domestic violence shelters, which may begin to address the pressing need for housing that many women will experience on leaving their abusers—but shelters inevitably have time limits and limitations on available space and may not allow a woman’s male children over a certain age to stay there. It all amounts to something a lot better than nothing, but it doesn’t amount to enough, and we don’t talk about that often enough. Instead we talk about the 10 women who have been killed in the past month and because the immediacy of those deaths is so pressing we don’t talk about the many more women who are homeless, who are traumatized and depressed, who are fighting in court to keep their children and for the resources to support them.

Guest Post: Shooting Dogs

With Darfur back in the news these days, it seems like a good time to revisit the lessons of another similar situation not so long ago. So last week I sat down to watch the aptly-named movie Shooting Dogs, which recounts the early days of the massacre (the genocide that dare not speak its name) in Rwanda, when nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in what might be the fastest ethnic purge ever to rage across a nation.

Shot by a largely Rwandan crew (many of whom were survivors of the incidents recounted in the film), the story is seen through the eyes of a British missionary and a wide-eyed college grad who is volunteering as an English teacher before the heady days when a coup brought down the president's plane, setting off the reign of bloodshed that lasted from April 19 to July of the same year. The next two hours loosely follows the events at the Ecole Technique Officielle, a school that was coincidentally housing a UN contingent of peace monitors and became a refugee camp for 2500 Tutsis seeking shelter from the massacres. The visuals are stunning and leave no room to avoid the reality of what murder by machete means - if you close your eyes, you still hear the thwack of blade hitting flesh, and the way screams go silent when a particularly important artery is severed. This movie should be shown in every high school classroom and college freshman political science class; it should be required watching for any foreigner who has any opinion at all on geopolitics in Africa.

But. (There is always a "but," isn't there?) Something is missing from the film, something that might be called context, something that might be called truth, something that might be called a reality check.

The focus on two white characters over a cast of a couple thousand Rwandans can be forgiven. After all, if this movie is meant to tell an untold story, it might as well aim to draw in the European/North American demographic - it's not like Rwandans need genocide explained to them. And it might be forgiven that Hugh Dancy's character - the young British teacher - seems to have nothing to add to the film besides the unerring ability to look handsomely devastated in his five o'clock shadow and his unlikely clean clothes even days into the crisis.

But there are some problems that a little harder to forgive. Chief among those is the glaring absence of context for the massacres - that the historic Hutu/Tutsi tension was fatally exacerbated by the European colonial powers that used divide-and-conquer tactics to control the populace at large. That the missionary presence - so exalted in this film - has never been a panacea for locals in any imperial port of call. That while wild-eyed machete-wielding Africans were making headlines, weapons firms out of the UK and several other nations were quietly shipping arms to the Hutu militias. That the massacres were not a populist uprising gone out of control, but a planned ethnic cleansing carefully orchestrated from the upper echelons of the Hutu-dominated government.

And most of all, that the depiction of heroic deeds on the part of the European characters are at best a work of fiction, and at worst a sorry attempt to claim some redemption in a situation where the UN and every one of its member states failed miserably to intervene when the consequence of inaction were brutally and unavoidably apparent.

The danger of this decontextualization is not so much that an inaccurate history might be passed into the pantheon of Hollywood half-truths, pasted up next to Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda on the roster of valiant deeds during tough times. The danger is that without any larger backdrop, the massacres look like exactly what your garden-variety racist would like to see: crazy Africans hacking to death other Africans. An internal problem. An impolite cultural flaw. A momentary lapse that reveals a fundamental incivility among, well, those people. Without the context of the decades of imperial rule, the machinations of a political system that was gunning for racial annihilation, and those pesky arms shipments from Europe, Shooting Dogs makes the Rwandan genocide look like just another uncivil moment in the proverbial heart of darkness that western nations love to ascribe to Africa and Africans.

If there is one redeeming moment, it is a startlingly honest dialogue between the young school teacher and a BBC reporter who has come to gather cinematic evidence of the murders. The reporter, a white woman, tells the school teacher how she can continue to witness such brutality in conflict after bloody conflict and still keep going. He replies with the inevitable cliche that she has just become numb to the violence.

No, she replies, It's worse than that.

In Bosnia, she says, every elderly woman could have been my grandmother.

Here, she says, they're just dead Africans.

And in four words, she captures the sentiment that drove the UN and the world into total inaction when action was needed most: they're just dead Africans. In times of war, times of pestilence, times of famine: they're just dead Africans. In Rwanda, in Somalia, and now in Darfur. They're just dead Africans.