Thursday, February 7, 2008

On prison

Prison brawl…

Both Broadsheet and the G&M are talking about women, babies, and prison on the same day! And not referring to each other!

So I am making the connection. Maybe this is more about making connections than skirting the issue. Hmm.

Okay, so Salon’s Carol Lloyd wrote about how she found out in Mexico, mothers who go to jail must take their children with them, and they stay with them until the children turn six, at which time the kids are wrenched from prison (and sus madres).

Today a BC woman convicted of manslaughter and her infant went to jail together. Well, they’d actually been in jail already for two years served, or so it seems. The woman killed her common-law husband. For the sake of this argument I’ll assume away the intuitive wonderings about battered women’s syndrome, self-defense, defense of her children, etc. I am taking it for granted she was a cold hearted killer, even though the stats are against me on this one.

The questions: Are prisons good places for kids? Do criminals have the right to keep their kids with them? If the kids are very young? If they are nursing? If the sentence is really short?

The comments sections for both articles are rife with the predictable: “what about the daddies?”; “will the infants sue for wrongful imprisonment?”, “this is motherhood worship”, etc.

Now, motherhood worship (different from the worship of my own mother, very different) is gross to me. I’ll get into that another time, and I admit I probably have a unique personal vexation towards this, and social belly-rubbing is not necessarily an apocalyptic sign that women have lost all meaning on the planet other than as wombs. I acknowledge that’s probably taking a bit far. Maybe I just fear the idea of nine months of people giving me the evil eye over my drunken olive gin martini.

Back to the questions: of course prisons are horrible places for kids. Prisons are horrible places for anybody. But a lot of places are horrible for kids. And it’s not like all of these women have wonderful men at their side ready to parent 100% while she does time. Sometimes the fathers are, uh, dead.

Some commentators suggested women lose all rights to their children when they commit crime (I really hope the writers meant serious, violent crime…because losing your children over a bunch of neglected parking tickets is, uh, well, tacky). Then the children are sent off to be adopted by “barren 40 year olds”. SERIOUSLY. Somebody wrote that. Enter Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner.

The reason this is about women is because very very few men single parent. It’s going up, but it is still extremely rare. And of course no men breastfeed. And of course of course, no men give birth while behind bars. Until these things change, it will remain a bigger deal for kids when women are sent to jail. We don’t even need get into the bonding mother-love mumbo-jumbo, we can just stick with the numbers.

Women, kids and prisons are a complex scenario, sure. But women don’t tend to be serious violent offenders, and as a result, women’s prisons aren’t generally as horrendously barren coffin-like as our movie imaginings of jail. Which makes me think: if the mom is not in jail for child abuse, and no nice legal guardian (such as Dad) is willing and able to take over, and it’s decided that the kid isn’t going to jail with its mother, there had better be a better alternative awaiting it. And besides a nice legal guardian I am not sure what that is. Not the adoption circuit, that’s for sure. Very few sentences are for the roughly 18 years we think it takes to become an adult. Mom is coming back. Kids aren’t dogs you give away when you move into a non-dog-friendly condo. In fact, you shouldn’t even do that to a dog, that’s heartless and selfish.

Maybe this issue is more about the need for a massive overhaul of how we do prison business and rehabilitation than it is about motherhood.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

on 3D

The G&M tries to stir the placental pot with a story today about the market for spa ultrasounds- 3D imaging available after about 20 weeks gestation at $100-200 for a half hour or so of fetal footage that includes a running commentary about how the fetus is moving this or that limb and-yes- announcements of “It’s a girl!”. Presumably the exclusive purpose of this spa treatment is like any spa treatment: entertainment. I think I’d rather have neon decals superglued to two inch acrylic nails than waste a half hour on this type of entertainment, but to each her own. The G&M asks such “controversial” questions as:
Is it dangerous to the fetus to expose it to nondiagnostic ultrasounds?
Is it fair for people to get to buy this kind of boutiquey “health care”?
Will this technology spur people (especially South Asians(?)) to abort fetuses they discover to be female?

Then the G&M (okay, writer Wency Lueng) makes a connection between this technology and BC’s Lakhvinder Kahlon’s killing last month of his 2 year old daughter because poor darling was sad he hadn’t had a son yet. This tidbit isn’t “controversial"- it’s just horrifically irrelevant journalistic space-filling. Killing toddlers because you are a sexist psychopath has nothing to do with Cadillac ultrasounding.

Nobody knows if it is dangerous to expose the fetus to some unnecessary ultrasounds. Health Canada hasn’t found any danger, but honestly that isn’t saying a whole hell of a lot and Health Canada regularly gives the go ahead when it should keep the red flag tucked in its breast pocket. I am not even sure this matters. We do know in addition to the no-nos of eating soft unpasteurized cheeses and boozing it up, it is dangerous to get mani-pedis (or any service in the vicinity of nail polishing) while pregnant, because the phlalates in the polish can cause little boy fetuses to keep their testicles all nestled up inside their bodies forever more. This possibility does not scare too many people away from the spa…in fact, little luxuries like massage, facials and oh, Brazilian waxes are very popular among pregnant women. [For the record, OPI has removed phlalates from it’s products, and if you aren’t using OPI, your aesthetician is a cheapskate].

While it probably isn’t fair to call this service “health care”, it is certainly fair for expectant parents to shell out for it. Just as they are free as a bird to buy the Hummer of strollers and a matching purebred Golden Retriever and lattes on Lawrence and Yonge. The only problem is if these high resolution images show something, in which case it’s back into the public system for rounds of diagnosis and possibly treatment or late-term abortion. It’s along the same lines as the two-tier market for plastic surgery: you pay for your liposuction, and my tax dollars will pay to save your life when the procedure is botched. We accept this because every one of us enjoys something in the private sphere that makes us dependent on the public health program: sports, beauty, sloth, sex, etc.- fun, risky business.

And no, this technology will not spur more gender-selective abortion, simply because you can’t even get an elective abortion in Canada after 20 weeks. Having this technology available would not have changed Kahlon’s homicidal mission. At twenty weeks, knowing fetal gender allows two things: twenty more weeks of colour-coded shopping, or twenty weeks of working up a fit of misogynistic rage.

Admittedly, normalizing early knowledge of fetal gender is a boom for consumerism, and legitimizes essentializing discussion about gender generally.

“Oh! You are having a boy…here’s little camo onesie...well, boys will be boys!”

Senseless spending and squishing the dynamic human into the paralyzing confines of gender stereotypes as early as possible both, well, suck. With all pregnancy gadgetry, one wonders how long until using this service is so ubiquitous as to be semi-required, either socially or (ugh) medically, like fetal heart monitors, epidurals and the hospital birth, period.

What I really want to talk about, what I think is really inflammatory, is asking what the hell we can do about socio-cultural structures that are so disgusted with the births of girls that potential parents choose not to abort because the pregnancy was unwanted, but to abort because a girl is unwanted. And what can be done about people like Kahlon who hate women so much they want them dead when they are still crawling? Develop an ultrasonic system to detect fevers of infanticide in potential parents, and a automatic lever booby trap that drenches them with a tsunami of contraceptive foam?

Monday, February 4, 2008

On autism

They did not succeed in convincing ABC to pull the debut episode of Eli Stone. But the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) was able to object to the litigation drama (in which fault for autism causation is legally found to rest in childhood vaccines) with the early release of a third-world-based study that finds thimerosal (mercury) in vaccines in Argentina to be swiftly secreted. What’s the connection? Although there isn’t any thimerosal in first-world vaccines anymore anyway, even if there was, it wouldn’t stay in a child’s system long enough to cause much of anything, let alone autism.

Some first world parents still refuse to vaccinate their children because of the fear that the vaccines will cause autism- now as common in children under five as one in 130. A 1998 British study linked the two, and despite the study being discredited soon after, the AAP responded by urging the removal of thimerosal from vaccines. So for about a decade now, first-world vaccines have been thimersoal-free. And autism incidence climbs…

There is an obvious question here as to why the third world still has to use what has for ten years up North been an unacceptable base for vaccine compounds. That there is inequity and dual markets for medicine and that the first world runs phase four trials on the backs of the third world is pretty damn clear. But it turns out the second-class vaccine isn’t any worse that the first, so the baffling thing in this case is what on earth constitutes precaution?

As a precautionary measure, the AAP urged an end to the use of thimerosal in vaccines. Because the media is never nuanced enough, and thimerosal is not exactly in vernacular use, the public heard a respected medical body saying “We don’t trust vaccines at the moment, something in them might cause autism”. As a precautionary measure, some parents lost faith in vaccination. Not most parents, but some.

What is surprising about this is that it contradicts a maxim in public health that risk aversion is antithetical to risk familiarity. So, for instance, even when we know irrefutably that smoking causes cancer, we do it anyway, everyday, but there is no chance in hell we are going bungee jumping. In this day and age, autism is the familiar risk- with incidence rates at nearly 1%, everybody knows somebody with an autistic child or student, and it is certainly more accessible than polio or rubella. Against the grain or not, there are some people who bungee jump, and there are some people who fear autism more than polio.

Now the AAP has changed its tune- not only are our first world vaccines definitely safe, but even thimerosal-containing vaccines are safe. This kind of back-and-forthing by medical associations and health agencies is relatively frequent. Just this fall a catfight broke out between the Canadian Cancer Society and the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, because the former adjusted its public health messaging around breast self-examination to holistic language, and the latter hissed at CCS’s inconsistency.

But surely the point of all this research is inconsistency, and more importantly, specificity. After a few decades of feminism and the era of evidence-based medicine, studies are supposed to use gender analysis. The results are expected to be inconsistent along gender lines. Studies are supposed to include subgroup analyses- it is for instance a wax seal of sophistication to find one ethnic background more predisposed.

But knowing more does not necessarily clarify how we should act to protect our health. The matriculation of medical “fact” has a paradoxical, or perhaps Socratic, ill-effect of plumping ignorance. We’re so precautious because of the knowledge gaps that we’ve become impotent to act.

A central tenet of feminist health theory is that women were guinea pigs for dangerous reproductive health “treatments” for decades (Thalidomide, DES, the original IUD, HRT, etc), and moving forward, precaution and woman-body-loving-preservation will be practiced. No more taking stuff to cure our uniquely feminine “concerns” until we are positive, without doubt, that the treatment is safe.

So we’re a little suspect of bringing silicon breast implants back on the market. And we’re a little suspect about the birth control pill brand that eliminates menstruation. And we don’t want episiotomies and C-sections and fetal heart monitors until you prove to us they’re not as unnecessary as recent research has led us to believe.

This year a new women’s health dynamite stick landed in provincial health treasure chests: the HPV vaccine, a roughly $400 multiple-dose vaccination for girls and women ages 9-26 that will prevent the strains of HPV that cause genital warts and 70% of cervical cancers. The hyped hubbub over autism and childhood vaccines has infected the word “vaccines” generally, even though intuitively we won’t catch autism at age twelve. (Or let’s hope we won’t, since publicly-funded autism therapy exhausts itself when children turn six!). So there is a deep vein of skepticism about the HPV vaccine, and no body (not even the anti-sex segments of the Catholic lobby) has been more vocal that the Canadian Women’s Health Network. Precaution is, after all, the golden ticket of health feminism.

They are advising against taking the first and only cancer-prevention vaccine. They are advising against government funding for something that was invented with women’s health in mind. Going back to the public health maxim of illogical risk aversion, they are advising against receiving a vaccine that can prevent the second most common cancer in young women because it might have side effects we don’t know about yet (after studies for a reasonable length of time and on hundreds of thousands of women). They are advising against a vaccination program because maybe it will make women and girls less prudent in the sack and less religious about their annual Pap. Yeah…maybe…if you don’t trust women and girls at all, and stop the commonplace promotion of safe sex and cervical screening…

Precaution about prevention is not safety; it’s like bathing in ignorance because the bathwater smells like vanilla nostalgia.

Friday, February 1, 2008

On an alcohol ban

Chief Robert Whitehead says he sought an alcohol ban on Yellow Quill First Nation after a series of what are suggested to be alcohol-related suicides. A majority of the band voted in favour of the ban in 2005, but it was blocked by Indian Affairs.

The deaths early this week of 1-year old Santana and 3-year old Kaydence Pauchay are beyond tragic. But these children did not die because of bureaucratic red tape gumming up an alcohol ban. They were dropped in the snow in t-shirts and diapers when their drunken father set off to run 400m to his sister’s, a short distance equivalent to once around a standard track. They died because their father was indisputably unfit to care for them, and no one in his large family was willing (or able) to step up to the plate.

More than a few commentators have already pointed out that Chief Whitehead’s alcohol ban is passing-the-buck. In communities with alcohol bans, residents can turn to dirtier intoxicants- gas, alcohol-based cleaners and disinfectants, etc. Or they can just smuggle in alcohol and have their bottled solace-seeking criminalized. So I will not dwell too long on the ineptitude of such a ban. But what solution can we propose? A law that parents put clothes on their children in -50 degree weather? A law that we not leave infants in snowbanks? A law that we not drink ourselves into oblivion when acting as the sole caregiver of babies? Do people really need such common sense legislation? Or do they need help avoiding a role they don’t want?

Every day we are involuntarily updated on the drunken, disorderly, unfit-to-parent escapades of Britney Spears. Perhaps Britney is mentally ill, even experiencing post-partum depression. Perhaps she is simply too young and self-involved to be ready to parent a one year old and a three year old, and her moody rebellion is typical of any adolescent who swats at responsibility like a cloud of midsummer flies.

Yesterday a woman dumped a baby in a parking lot at a Toronto-area mall. It wasn’t a barely-viable preemie neonate, but an 8-month old. Not much is known about the infant, but we have to accept that this baby was not a wanted baby.

Parents who want their babies swaddle them up and hold them close.

What these news stories all have in common is child neglect. More rules, surveillance, and force will not cure these parents of their tragic flaws and make them eager, capable parents. We cannot require families and communities to notice and pick up the slack. We can support the decisions of women to terminate pregnancies they do not want. We can legislate top-quality, publicly-funded sex education, contraception availability and abortion services in this province and nationally. Medicare-covered abortion insures that every baby born is wanted. It insures women who choose to go through a pregnancy and give up their offspring for adoption are doing so because they really and truly want to, and have not been railroaded into being a womb-for-hire. It insures parents choose to be parents. It improves the chances that parents have straightened their oxygen masks on their own heads first, and are ready to help their kids with theirs...