I was in Quebec and Ontario and back again over the last two weeks, accumulating curiousities and perversities to write about as this week peters out and the last crusts of blackened snow melt.
I had dinner with the lesbian couple I mentioned a few posts ago; doctor S and I joined some other mutual friends in our old neighbourhood to get the low-down on lesbian procreation. Here are the details you’ve all been wondering about: no turkey baster and no known selfless friend, but a fertility clinic that operates on a competitive and early-riser-privileging first-come-first-served basis, using an anonymous American’s semen.
American? Yes…because Canada does not allow payment for reproductive products (including semen, ova and surrogacy), our men are not as keen to “donate” sperm as their American brothers. Since this regulation came into effect, basically all of Canada’s sperm banks have closed. When I was researching sickle cell disease and eugenics, I called around to find out if heterozygous carriers could donate sperm, and discovered there were only three banks in the country at that time. (And yes, men with SCD trait could donate).
Three sperm banks eh? Well, not only does the restriction on payment for semen in this country raise the commodity value of semen (transporting sperm from another country is probably more costly than boy-next-door production, given today’s fuel costs anyway), reduce the supply and the variety of the product available, it also causes a problem for patients in an area I’m new to but getting increasingly engaged in (more posts on that to follow): cancer. Young cancer patients, often diagnosed with reproductive cancers, could really use high-quality, easy access fertility clinics and banks for their reproductive products to improve fertility experiences after systemic and radiation therapies. If there were a commercial market to back up the infrastructure for these banks, it would not be such a struggle for young guys with testicular cancer to find a place to store their seed before they go in for treatment. At the very least, it wouldn’t be such an afterthought.
But back to lesbian conception. My pals sorted through an on-line catalogue, ruling out prominent and inheritable chronic diseases and donors with poor political preferences. Just kidding- but one mother being an epidemiologist, the reactive gleaning of health status from the list was pretty reasonable. They purchased a baby photo of the lad and listened to his voice on CD. Hearing him made them cry. Meanwhile at the head of the table, another former classmate of mine is doing her own modern catalogue browsing. About what she’d accept from an adoptee preschooler- FAS, mental and physical disabilities, boy, girl, etc. It’s lavalife for infant selection.
But cyber quipping aside, I am not adverse at all- quite the opposite. Not only because if couples are going to go through the enormous wait, expense and anxiety of assisted reproductive or public adoption, they should have as much say in the matter as possible. I was struck by the painful self-study (or couple study) the process is. The grotesque truth-telling, grotesque because it is so black and white and typed.
Most of the time we demonstrate our preference for partners (and genetic offspring) without chronic disease by spooning up against the evolutionarily-preferable healthy & strong. No one goes around judging our selfishness for the choosing of a non-smoking athlete with an IQ of at least 125. Except for some bitter jealous sniping, maybe.
But further and as Dr K pointed out, every big life-altering action is a crapshoot and the odds run proportional no matter how you approach the gamble. A pregnancy can result in trisome 21. An assisted pregnancy can result in trisome 21. An adoption can result in trisome 21. All can be terminated, at who knows what level of disappointment and further delay. But then again all could result in something not on the screening list, not knowable from genetic pasts or amniotic presents. And trisome 21 might be something you think you can handle anyway.
Lists (and science!) lacking all-inclusiveness, they’re more of a tool for some heavy self-reflection than a conclusive decision aid. And perhaps in the context of deciding whether a donor’s history of heart disease is more or less acceptable than one of juvenile diabetes, there will be some initiation into the thorny brush of sharing parenting.
Monday, March 31, 2008
sex & research
Study of Women’s Sexual Well-Being – UNB researchers are interested in how women’s experiences affect their sexual well-being. We are looking for women who are at least 18 to participate in an anonymous, online survey. Chance to win cash prizes. Go to www.unbstudy.com or contact us. Dr. Sandra Byers, University of New Brunswick, byers@unb.ca.
Monday, March 17, 2008
on chubscicles
This past weekend my family had a gentle couple and their thunderous chubscicle of a one year old infant over for dinner. The chunkamunka tank girl in diapers ate everything we did, and almost as much. But that’s not what was remarkable…we’d seen this child in action before, we knew what was coming.
What was remarkable was what my sister noticed and I failed to see. See, the wife in this married couple is a health care worker. So, one second after her maternity leave ended, she was back up in the hospital. Her husband is not a health care worker, and he is staying home to raise the buddhababy. He is already training her to consume like a team of quarterbacks. Noice.
My sister said, What a great guy! He must really be secure in his masculinity! (Okay she obviously didn’t say that, but it was implied). He must really love his baby!
And I thought, oh my goodness, it never for one instant occurred to me that things might be otherwise. I was so used to being the lone woman in a large group of doctor wives, I forgot the health care sector is still largely negotiating historical hierarchies and gurney-journeys of sexism. (To clarify, I haven’t been much good as a doctor wife since I moved out of Ontario, but I used to whimsically play the part well, attend the dinners, voyage to the conferences, and attempt to look like one helluva trophy). And all of my peers in this elite clique wore the pants. All my fellow attachés were fellows, distinctly XY. We’d huddle together and swirl champagne flutes and talk about our yoga classes and recipes and bathroom renos and pets and seasonal wardrobes while our mates debated the efficacy of the last lambasted tribe of Cox 2 inhibitors.
Sort of wish I was kidding. (Of course I don’t. I delighted in this gender play).
But I am surprised I got so used to it as to take it for granted, and not notice the great-guy homemaking parents on the arms of female health care workers. My sister is right, it’s a great guy move, and it's a rare & dynamic model for child/chubbichins-raising that i ought not brush off as par for the course in this generation of gender-bent doctor-wiving.
What was remarkable was what my sister noticed and I failed to see. See, the wife in this married couple is a health care worker. So, one second after her maternity leave ended, she was back up in the hospital. Her husband is not a health care worker, and he is staying home to raise the buddhababy. He is already training her to consume like a team of quarterbacks. Noice.
My sister said, What a great guy! He must really be secure in his masculinity! (Okay she obviously didn’t say that, but it was implied). He must really love his baby!
And I thought, oh my goodness, it never for one instant occurred to me that things might be otherwise. I was so used to being the lone woman in a large group of doctor wives, I forgot the health care sector is still largely negotiating historical hierarchies and gurney-journeys of sexism. (To clarify, I haven’t been much good as a doctor wife since I moved out of Ontario, but I used to whimsically play the part well, attend the dinners, voyage to the conferences, and attempt to look like one helluva trophy). And all of my peers in this elite clique wore the pants. All my fellow attachés were fellows, distinctly XY. We’d huddle together and swirl champagne flutes and talk about our yoga classes and recipes and bathroom renos and pets and seasonal wardrobes while our mates debated the efficacy of the last lambasted tribe of Cox 2 inhibitors.
Sort of wish I was kidding. (Of course I don’t. I delighted in this gender play).
But I am surprised I got so used to it as to take it for granted, and not notice the great-guy homemaking parents on the arms of female health care workers. My sister is right, it’s a great guy move, and it's a rare & dynamic model for child/chubbichins-raising that i ought not brush off as par for the course in this generation of gender-bent doctor-wiving.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
on right now
Well let me just say I am pretty joyful even though it is snowing for the 76th day in a row here in New Brunswick. That’s not accurate so don’t get your knickers in a knot objecting or objectifying. I think about sex politics more than the weather. Whatever.
I am joyful because my lesbian friends are having a baby. And the higher-risk pregnancy (they are not young dewy Nicole Ritchies, but I think they are babes) is looking safe. And they’ll get paid mat leave for a year. And then their little boy will hang out with me and I’ll teach him a thing or two about men.
So if that isn’t something to be happy about I don’t know what is.
Although I imagine I should make a plug for paid mat leave for the self-employed, the studying, and the home-making. Plug!
But back to how amazing it is to live in this world, right now, here. It is.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
On blood
Last night I gave blood. It took a while for the Red Cross to find me again after my cross-country move, but they did, and I dutifully showed up. Actually I’m lying about the duty part, I was grateful to show up. Giving blood is a free anonymous no-fuss bimonthly HIV test, and I had missed at least three opportunities since I left Ontario.
One evening when I was still living down the block from Hess Village, I was throwing a dinner party, the last one from an extended era of exclusively vegetarian cooking. The guests included several harried general internists who arrived late, an adulterous couple of political scientists who spent most of the evening necking and smoking on the wee balcony, and one extremely arrogant health economist with washboard posture and at least seven profound horizontal forehead wrinkles. I had given blood before the party in the medical centre where I was then studying and working, and the wine was rushing to fill in the gaps of liquid in my veins.
Because long ago and for a long time I loved a man with a Southern African passport, I always have to correct the nurse when she routinely fills in the No bubble before finishing asking whether I have slept with anyone who has lived in Africa since 1977. They always look up the exact country an African sex partner is from. They always announce me No Risk, even though as an epidemiology student (frankly, as someone who had studied math, ever) I knew very well if you wanted some risk, go sleep around (directly or indirectly) where prevalence is at 20-40%. I wondered why they asked this question if it didn’t really matter, when frankly, maybe it kind of should?
HIV testing is a fascinating subject for the amateur bioethicist, and the health economist in the room presumed himself to be one. He argued they should take the blood, test the blood, and if it is clean, use the blood. They do obviously test all the blood anyhow. Why gum up the donation process with fifty questions? Why the long judgmental stare when you concede that yeah, ugh, I sort of kind of slept with an African? Or god forbid, a half dozen of them?
The doctors in the house scoffed and retorted it’s a process of risk reduction, it is a standard approach. That’s why gay men and Africans and mad cow eaters and Accutane users can’t donate- to improve efficiency, and also, public faith in the system. But honestly now, doesn’t that just make you worry that the Red Cross testing techniques might be highly mediocre?
Just in case anybody gets the wrong idea- I do not think that about the Red Cross.
What I have come to think is that the blood clinic’s cubicle nursing station is a secular confessional.
“Have you ever had sex with a man who had sex with a man?”
“Have you ever had sex with someone who paid money or drugs for sex?”
And a reminder too of our secular uncertainties, our sexual agnosticism. Because Nurse Betty, some things I just don’t know.
One evening when I was still living down the block from Hess Village, I was throwing a dinner party, the last one from an extended era of exclusively vegetarian cooking. The guests included several harried general internists who arrived late, an adulterous couple of political scientists who spent most of the evening necking and smoking on the wee balcony, and one extremely arrogant health economist with washboard posture and at least seven profound horizontal forehead wrinkles. I had given blood before the party in the medical centre where I was then studying and working, and the wine was rushing to fill in the gaps of liquid in my veins.
Because long ago and for a long time I loved a man with a Southern African passport, I always have to correct the nurse when she routinely fills in the No bubble before finishing asking whether I have slept with anyone who has lived in Africa since 1977. They always look up the exact country an African sex partner is from. They always announce me No Risk, even though as an epidemiology student (frankly, as someone who had studied math, ever) I knew very well if you wanted some risk, go sleep around (directly or indirectly) where prevalence is at 20-40%. I wondered why they asked this question if it didn’t really matter, when frankly, maybe it kind of should?
HIV testing is a fascinating subject for the amateur bioethicist, and the health economist in the room presumed himself to be one. He argued they should take the blood, test the blood, and if it is clean, use the blood. They do obviously test all the blood anyhow. Why gum up the donation process with fifty questions? Why the long judgmental stare when you concede that yeah, ugh, I sort of kind of slept with an African? Or god forbid, a half dozen of them?
The doctors in the house scoffed and retorted it’s a process of risk reduction, it is a standard approach. That’s why gay men and Africans and mad cow eaters and Accutane users can’t donate- to improve efficiency, and also, public faith in the system. But honestly now, doesn’t that just make you worry that the Red Cross testing techniques might be highly mediocre?
Just in case anybody gets the wrong idea- I do not think that about the Red Cross.
What I have come to think is that the blood clinic’s cubicle nursing station is a secular confessional.
“Have you ever had sex with a man who had sex with a man?”
“Have you ever had sex with someone who paid money or drugs for sex?”
And a reminder too of our secular uncertainties, our sexual agnosticism. Because Nurse Betty, some things I just don’t know.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
On Tennessee
There’s a bill now in Tennessee to force paternity tests before any father’s name is scribed across a birth certificate. Assume they don’t intend to put infertile men whose female partners have used donated sperm through this process. Assume they scrawl John Doe when the father is unknown or the mother has chosen to make him so. Stick with the men who showed up for the birth and want to participate in parenting and partnering and the regular nuclear package.
Somewhere between 10 and 35% of these men are not their babies’ biological fathers. It depends, but those are the scientific estimates. There are a lot of reasons women fail to disclose to their partners that a child is not his, which include women being raped (including by their own family members). When I was interviewing in southern Ontario last year for a study about newborn genetic testing, I learned that immigrant women fear losing sponsorship if (consensual or not) sexual indiscretion was discovered.
The argument for tying up any loose ends between biological and experiential paternity is the weak Kantian conviction that the child has a right to know. That their mother is a cheater or a victim? That their daddy was cuckolded? And that their biological “father” is not in the picture/ is violent/ is a relative of their mother (gross)/ etc. Really…what does knowing that help, besides undermining the authoritative and familial aura of both parents, potentially destroying their intimacy with each other, and inviting the state into the bedroom with a surveillance team?
Some secrets are only for discovery in mothy grandma attic treasure trunk pillages of secret love letters and tear-stained leather-bound diaries, much later in life when we’ve all had our own brushes with infidelity and tend towards compassion and empathy.
See news article: http://www.wsmv.com/news/15436238/detail.html
Somewhere between 10 and 35% of these men are not their babies’ biological fathers. It depends, but those are the scientific estimates. There are a lot of reasons women fail to disclose to their partners that a child is not his, which include women being raped (including by their own family members). When I was interviewing in southern Ontario last year for a study about newborn genetic testing, I learned that immigrant women fear losing sponsorship if (consensual or not) sexual indiscretion was discovered.
The argument for tying up any loose ends between biological and experiential paternity is the weak Kantian conviction that the child has a right to know. That their mother is a cheater or a victim? That their daddy was cuckolded? And that their biological “father” is not in the picture/ is violent/ is a relative of their mother (gross)/ etc. Really…what does knowing that help, besides undermining the authoritative and familial aura of both parents, potentially destroying their intimacy with each other, and inviting the state into the bedroom with a surveillance team?
Some secrets are only for discovery in mothy grandma attic treasure trunk pillages of secret love letters and tear-stained leather-bound diaries, much later in life when we’ve all had our own brushes with infidelity and tend towards compassion and empathy.
See news article: http://www.wsmv.com/news/15436238/detail.html
Monday, March 3, 2008
On loss
The past week was an unlucky mess of reproductive doom in my wide-flung social network. One friend is flying a thousand miles to the nearest free abortion clinic. One friend lost her very wanted very first pregnancy in the first trimester. Another at five months, making it technically an inter-partum death. The last doesn’t know what to do but knows abortion isn’t it, and every day she wakes with blood on the sheets.
When I was a little girl, younger than six, we visited a neighbour at the Chalmer’s hospital after she miscarried. Her permed hair was soggy around her pillow and her eyes coloured in black from exhaustion and grief. Maybe that’s a bit young to learn about reproductive loss, but I think I was in the hospital with pneumonia and my mother and I happened to walk by her room and isn’t that just always the underhanded way we discover our cruel and gruesome femininity.
The first time a friend went to the Morgentaler clinic I stayed up all night sobbing. I was not mourning the potential baby, I was actually thinking about my barely employed friend having to ask her parents for the money, having a scorching love affair end so painfully, and feeling regret at using inadequate contraception. There was also the introductory bitch slap of the body betraying. We’d only been having sex for a few years and it was the dreamiest thing, until it cost you half a semester’s tuition and came with two days of wretched cramping.
Abortion in my cohort became pretty routine, a large minority of my friends had one or two as we figured out love and trust and that grapefruit diets and training for a marathon can screw up the pill’s effectiveness. Common or not, I still get pissed about how much it costs and travel issues and the gamut of access restrictions. In this paradoxical era of daily regulatory assaults on reproductive freedom while Jamie Lynn and adolescent America shift teenage pregnancy stats into a growth industry, mostly I share the gratitude that this medical service is available legally and that my friends are all secure enough to ask for and afford it.
But I am a bit older now. I am at the age that the medical workforce wishes would get pregnant. The age of glowy dewy healthy tabloid-pretty pregnancy. I am Nicole Ritchie’s age. Christina Aguilera’s age. Yeah, Britney’s age. I go to weddings pretty frequently and buy housewarming gifts of pottery salad bowls. And my friends are starting to wish to be pregnant.
And they are starting to experience great disappointment.
The transition from anathema fertility to maternal instinct is instinctual. No philosophical adjustment comes with that, it is a literal swelling of the gut. I don’t feel it yet but I figure and am regularly warned it is a matter of time, and I do feel uncharacteristic awe at the announcements of others.
Lately, as often as births, there are miscarriages and inter-partum deaths and still births.
In the one on one conversation there isn’t a loss for words. I am not at all restrained in saying how much life is a bitch and statistics show these losses as far from anomalous and hopefully next time it will be better.
But public discussion about mourning pregnancy loss is awkward because I do not ever want to be shuffled into the mob of mostly middle-aged zealotous anti-choice protesters outside the Brunswick street clinic on Tuesday am, flapping their grotesque placards and playing cats cradle with garlands of rosary beads. Mourning a lost pregnancy that was chosen and wanted and nurtured has to be clearly compartmentalized from threatening taunts of post-abortion syndromes and such. We need to talk about reproductive loss because pregnancy is not always the pink-cheeked cover of People. We just don’t seem to know how to talk about it.
I ask because we have to, and not just with our friends. At the very least, women have to get time off work for a D&C. They have to ask for that time and as employers and employees can we get our mouths around that conversation? Women have to wonder if something is wrong with them and if this will ever work and if so at what cost. Men share those worries. We all get a bit worried about declining fertility, and these worries confront the reactive discourses of xenophobia, patronizing medical regulation, and anti-feminist ageism.
Not only is this conversation uncomfortable because the last thing vulnerable abortion access needs is more focus on the fetus, but because pregnancy is so often a secret and a surprise. It is not like most loss, where what is loss was once known. Cultural empathy has to extend to discretion as much as it scratches at suppression, protecting women’s secrets while formulating compassion for a deeply gendered grief.
When I was a little girl, younger than six, we visited a neighbour at the Chalmer’s hospital after she miscarried. Her permed hair was soggy around her pillow and her eyes coloured in black from exhaustion and grief. Maybe that’s a bit young to learn about reproductive loss, but I think I was in the hospital with pneumonia and my mother and I happened to walk by her room and isn’t that just always the underhanded way we discover our cruel and gruesome femininity.
The first time a friend went to the Morgentaler clinic I stayed up all night sobbing. I was not mourning the potential baby, I was actually thinking about my barely employed friend having to ask her parents for the money, having a scorching love affair end so painfully, and feeling regret at using inadequate contraception. There was also the introductory bitch slap of the body betraying. We’d only been having sex for a few years and it was the dreamiest thing, until it cost you half a semester’s tuition and came with two days of wretched cramping.
Abortion in my cohort became pretty routine, a large minority of my friends had one or two as we figured out love and trust and that grapefruit diets and training for a marathon can screw up the pill’s effectiveness. Common or not, I still get pissed about how much it costs and travel issues and the gamut of access restrictions. In this paradoxical era of daily regulatory assaults on reproductive freedom while Jamie Lynn and adolescent America shift teenage pregnancy stats into a growth industry, mostly I share the gratitude that this medical service is available legally and that my friends are all secure enough to ask for and afford it.
But I am a bit older now. I am at the age that the medical workforce wishes would get pregnant. The age of glowy dewy healthy tabloid-pretty pregnancy. I am Nicole Ritchie’s age. Christina Aguilera’s age. Yeah, Britney’s age. I go to weddings pretty frequently and buy housewarming gifts of pottery salad bowls. And my friends are starting to wish to be pregnant.
And they are starting to experience great disappointment.
The transition from anathema fertility to maternal instinct is instinctual. No philosophical adjustment comes with that, it is a literal swelling of the gut. I don’t feel it yet but I figure and am regularly warned it is a matter of time, and I do feel uncharacteristic awe at the announcements of others.
Lately, as often as births, there are miscarriages and inter-partum deaths and still births.
In the one on one conversation there isn’t a loss for words. I am not at all restrained in saying how much life is a bitch and statistics show these losses as far from anomalous and hopefully next time it will be better.
But public discussion about mourning pregnancy loss is awkward because I do not ever want to be shuffled into the mob of mostly middle-aged zealotous anti-choice protesters outside the Brunswick street clinic on Tuesday am, flapping their grotesque placards and playing cats cradle with garlands of rosary beads. Mourning a lost pregnancy that was chosen and wanted and nurtured has to be clearly compartmentalized from threatening taunts of post-abortion syndromes and such. We need to talk about reproductive loss because pregnancy is not always the pink-cheeked cover of People. We just don’t seem to know how to talk about it.
I ask because we have to, and not just with our friends. At the very least, women have to get time off work for a D&C. They have to ask for that time and as employers and employees can we get our mouths around that conversation? Women have to wonder if something is wrong with them and if this will ever work and if so at what cost. Men share those worries. We all get a bit worried about declining fertility, and these worries confront the reactive discourses of xenophobia, patronizing medical regulation, and anti-feminist ageism.
Not only is this conversation uncomfortable because the last thing vulnerable abortion access needs is more focus on the fetus, but because pregnancy is so often a secret and a surprise. It is not like most loss, where what is loss was once known. Cultural empathy has to extend to discretion as much as it scratches at suppression, protecting women’s secrets while formulating compassion for a deeply gendered grief.
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