Women's Bioethics Project

Women's Bioethics Project:

It’s not Sci-Fi. It’s real life. It’s your life. The rapid advance of biotechnology is outpacing our ability as a society to absorb the effect it will have on our lives. Real life scenarios that were beyond our collective imagination a decade ago leave many of us today struggling to comprehend and evaluate the implications that they may have on daily life. From stem cell research to the Schiavo case, it is a whole new world. These issues affect women in profound ways because of how directly their bodies and roles are touched by them. Women carry babies, live longer, and predominately provide care for children, the sick, disabled, and elderly. Moreover, globally, women are more likely to be impoverished, and unable to access health care. Many new technologies are still in their infancy. Debate about them is just beginning. Now is the time for women to weigh in on these issues. Won't you join us?

The Full-Time Blues

New York Times: By Judith Warner

...But the conversation we should be having these days really isn’t one about What Mothers Want. (This has been known for years; surveys dating back to the early 1990s have shown that up to 80 percent of mothers — working and at-home alike — consistently say they wish they could work part time.) The interesting question is, rather, why they’re not getting it.

Only 24 percent of working mothers now work part time. The reason so few do isn’t complicated: most women can’t afford to. Part-time work doesn’t pay.

Women on a reduced schedule earn almost 18 percent less than their full-time female peers with equivalent jobs and education levels... Part-time jobs rarely come with benefits. They tend to be clustered in low-paying fields like the retail and service industries. And in better-paid professions, a reduced work schedule very often can mean cutting down from 50-plus hours a week to 40-odd — hardly a “privilege” worth paying for with a big pay cut.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In Europe, significant steps have been made to make part-time work a livable reality for those who seek it. Denying fair pay and benefits to part-time workers is now illegal. Parents in Sweden have the right to work a six-hour day at prorated pay until their children turn 8 years old. Similar legislation helps working parents in France, Austria, and Belgium and any employee in Germany and the Netherlands who wants to cut back.

None of this creates a perfect world. Feminists have long been leery of part-time work policies, which tend to be disproportionately used by women, mommy-tracking them and placing them at an economic disadvantage within their marriages and in society. The American model of work-it-out-for-yourself employment is Darwinian, but women’s long working hours have gone a long way toward helping them advance up the career ladder....

The place to start, ideally, would be universal health care, which is really the necessary condition for making freedom of choice a reality for working parents. European-style regulations outlawing wage and benefit discrimination against part-time workers would be nice, too, though it’s not a terribly realistic goal for the U.S., where even unpaid family leave is still a hot-button issue for employers. ...

A Crack in Team Bush

New York Times:By JUDITH WARNER

It was a shock to see Defense Secretary Robert Gates battling tears Wednesday evening as he spoke about Maj. Douglas Zembiec, a Marine and father of a 1-year-old daughter, who was killed in May after requesting a second tour of duty in Iraq. Shocking and yet somehow profoundly validating and cathartic. ...

But here was something new: an acknowledgment, however unbidden, of the complex range of negative emotions — sadness and frustration and, yes, I think, guilt — that’s now weighing upon the nation’s soul after four disastrous years in Iraq.

We’d never seen anything like it in the “Henny Penny” brush-offs of Gates’s predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. We probably never will discern any inkling of it in Condoleezza Rice’s robotic equanimity. President Bush is known to meet privately with wounded soldiers and families of the fallen and is said, at those times, to become emotional, but little of that softness seeps into his often cocky — and defensive — public demeanor.

It’s hard to imagine much sympathy emanating from a man who admits to no soul-searching on Iraq, who vacationed through the panic and devastation of Hurricane Katrina and who recently shrugged off the issue of health care reform with the line, “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

Rice, I read in the recent biography, “Twice as Good,” is so incapable of empathy that, in her late teens, and after years of assiduous and ambitious practice, she was forced to give up her dreams of becoming a concert pianist because her teacher felt she didn’t have the “interest or inclination” to “make someone else’s thoughts and emotions [her] own.” ...

“He [Gates] is obviously a man who tries his best to serve his country as best he possibly can, and he isn’t afraid to show his emotions...”

I pictured Vice President Dick Cheney miming, “Gag me,” and Rumsfeld swaying with the motions of playing an imaginary violin. And I thought: how wonderful it is that someone, on high, has had the strength to own the pain that’s been caused by our disastrous course in Iraq. ...

Warner ends the piece veering into gender politics. Maybe she's right, but I think the assumption is overdone, and deserves to be tested. Maybe more of our politicos, both male and female, should have colonoscopies, and have the sticks pulled out of their asses.

Does 'problem talk' depress girls?

Broadsheet: Salon.com: By Carol Lloyd

We're told to let our emotions out, intead of bottling them up. But does talking about our problems make us feel better or worse? That depends on who the 'us' is, according to a new study from the University of Missouri at Columbia. The study published in this month's Developmental Psychology examined 'co-rumination,' which was defined as 'excessively discussing problems ... characterized by mutual encouragement of problem talk, rehashing problems, speculating about problems, and dwelling on negative affect.'

Smell like preteen spirit? No doubt, but ironically, this strategy for building close relationships and gaining moral support seems to have some unintended effects. In general, interpersonal discussions led to 'high-quality' friendships for both sexes, but for girls, long-term 'co-rumination' was predictive of 'anxiety and depressive symptoms.' In other words, airing all that dark 'self-talk' may make girls feel closer, but it doesn't necessarily cheer them up. It may make them feel worse. The study, which looked at 813 kids age 8-15, found that boys reported no similarly adverse effects. ...The study didn't address why girls display a more negative reaction to this sort of bonding than boys, but the researchers wonder if girls' tendency to blame themselves for perceived failures has something to do with it. ...

Despite the study's obvious limitations in scope and depth, however, it gets at a central conundrum of our assumptions about communication and the therapeutic industry -- be it the 12-step movement or seven years in psychoanalysis. As another researcher told the Los Angeles Times, these findings support other studies that have found that support groups can intensify eating disorders and delinquency. "You might think having social support is conducive to mental health," Carol Dweck, of Stanford University, told the L.A. Times. "But getting people with issues together doesn't always make things better."

The Pentagon insults Hillary Clinton. Big mistake.

Slate Magazine:By Fred Kaplan

On July 16—eight weeks later—[Senator Clinton] received a reply from the undersecretary of defense for policy, Eric Edelman, saying that he was writing on behalf of Secretary Gates. After a page of boilerplate, Edelman got to the point:

Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. … Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risk in order to achieve compromises of national reconciliation. …

He concluded:

I assure you, however, that as with other plans, we are always evaluating and planning for possible contingencies. As you know, it is long-standing departmental policy that operational plans, including contingency plans, are not related outside of the department.

I appreciate your interest in our mission in Iraq, and would be happy to answer any further questions.

In effect, Edelman was telling her three things. First, you're practically a traitor for even asking these questions. Second, maybe we do have contingency plans for withdrawal, but we're not going to tell you about them. Third, run along now, little lady, I've got work to do.

Today, Clinton wrote a second letter to Gates, informing him that this underling Edelman—"writing on your behalf"—seems to believe "that congressional oversight emboldens our enemies." Calling his letter "outrageous and dangerous," Clinton wondered whether it "accurately characterizes your views as secretary of defense." She then renewed her request for the briefing, "classified if necessary," and added, as a kicker, "I would appreciate the courtesy of a prompt response directly from you." ...

As a discrete episode, this spat may soon fade away. Gates, who may well have no more than a dim awareness of Edelman's letter (or of Clinton's initial request), will probably eat the proverbial humble pie by sending over someone with a classified briefing—or maybe even delivering it himself.

But as a political symbol, the incident may have greater endurance. Senators put up with a lot of evasion and deceit from the executive branch, but one thing they will not tolerate is being explicitly left out of the loop. In his letter to Clinton, Edelman not only said she had no business in the loop, he all but accused of her treason for asking to be let in. If senators feel the slightest tug of solidarity (and they tend to, on matters of senatorial privilege), they may rally around their trampled colleague. The sense of insult may spill over into their feelings about the war in general and perhaps strengthen, if just slightly, the ranks of the opposed.

As for the broader electorate, women have famously mixed feelings about Hillary Clinton, but many of them tend to drop their caveats when they sense that her womanhood is under attack....Edelman wasn't yelling at Clinton, but he was patronizing her ("I appreciate your interest in our mission in Iraq. …"), shooing her away from serious men's business—and that may, in its own way, decisively rankle...

Getting Patrick Pregnant

The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper:

I met Patrick in the fall of 1995. By spring, we lived together. We were 20 years old and in college. My degrees are in English, but that entire year, I studied theory. Queer theory, feminist theory, critical theory. In one class, called Bodyworks, about cyborgs and organ transplants and plastic surgery and gender reassignment, my professor, Timothy Lenoir, mentioned that somebody in England was offering a million dollars to the first man who volunteered to get pregnant. 'You'd be perfect,' I told Patrick. He didn't disagree. We were outspoken feminists....

Sure, Patrick would be a great father, I've always thought. But he'd be an even better mother. Meanwhile, I am career-driven, impatient, and overbooked. I would work. He would stay home at least part-time. He would be the 51-percent parent...

it's basically an ectopic pregnancy. these can be carried out safely in women, although it's rare. we'd do in vitro fertilization with my egg and your sperm. the fetus would be injected above your intestine into your abdominal cavity. it would hook up to your circulation system by attaching to an organ. (they just need a line, they do most of the rest, and you'd take female hormones, too.) it's like a cross between IVF and the preparation for a sex change.

wow.

naturally, it's reversible.

right.

then, you'd deliver by c-section. the delivery wouldn't be dangerous for the baby but could be for you, because the placenta would be attached to your organs instead of to the inside of a uterus. but even that could be solved, since it's possible you could have a uterus transplanted to contain the fetus. ...

Glenn McGee considered getting pregnant when he was a wunderkind bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. It was 1999, and revered British scientist/IVF-pioneer Lord Robert Winston had just announced in London's Sunday Times that "male pregnancy would certainly be possible," a concept he outlined in his book The IVF Revolution.

Another British fertility expert, Dr. Simon Fishel, put it bluntly: "There is no reason why a man could not carry a child. The placenta provides the necessary hormonal conditions, so it doesn't have to be inside a woman."

"Having reviewed all the science, what we know is this," says McGee, now director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute in Albany, New York. We talked a couple of weeks ago on the phone. "These little creatures are very much self-determining, much more than we knew even 10 years ago. So could they be born? Yeah, probably." ...

The science isn't the problem.

"I would have been first in line, I really would have," McGee tells me. "I actually thought it would be kind of cool to be pregnant—I was jealous, in a way."

How Monica Goodling played the "girl" card

By Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine:

Let's pretend for a moment that the world divides into two types of women: the soft, shy, girly kind who live to serve and the brash, aggressive feminists who live to emasculate. Not our paradigm, but one that's more alive than dead.

When she was White House liaison in Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department, Monica Goodling, 33, had the power to hire and fire seasoned government lawyers who had taken the bar when she was still carrying around a plastic Hello Kitty purse. Goodling, in fact, described herself as a 'type-A woman' who blocked the promotion of another type-A woman basically because the office couldn't tolerate infighting between two strong women. ('I'm not just partisan! I'm sexist, too!') That move sounds pretty grown-up and steely. Yet in her testimony this week before the House judiciary committee, Goodling turned herself back into a little girl, and it's worth pointing out that the tactic worked brilliantly."...

What really shot Goodling into the stratosphere of baby-doll girls were her own whispered words: "At heart," she testified, "I am a fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way." The idea, of course, was to scrub away her past image as ruthless, power-mad, and zealously Christian....And at the heart of Goodling's ingénue performance? The astonishing claim that while she broke the law, she "didn't mean to." This is the stuff of preschoolers, not cum laude graduates of law school....

But heed the lesson, girlfriends. It works. Republicans on the House judiciary committee had only gentle words and lavish praise for this girlish Monica. Even as she testified to repeatedly breaking the law, these genial uncles lauded her "class" and her courage, falling over themselves to observe how hard testifying must have been for her. Kyle Sampson must be wondering where all this sympathy was when he was on the stand. For the most part, even the Democrats were too bamboozled to be effective. It's no accident that some of the day's most brutal questioning came from Reps. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif.; Maxine Waters, D-Calif.; and Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; who may well have been as annoyed by Goodling's Girl Secretary performance as they were by the underlying conduct....

What will happen to Goodling? She'll lay low for a while. She'll leave Washington, maybe. And then she'll re-emerge in another position of power; power that she will cast as reflected glow from greater men. Because to help yourself by playing helpless is the stuff of real smarts and savvy. Goodling's day in the spotlight wasn't exactly a good day for feminism. But in the end, maybe she's bamboozled us, too, because if we ever have to testify before Congress, hand us the pigtails and lollipop.

If this doesn't elicit some comment, I'm not sure what will.

Shark Family Values

Study: Female Sharks Fertilize Own Eggs - From The New York Times:

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -- Female sharks can fertilize their own eggs and give birth without sperm from males, according to a new study of the asexual reproduction of a hammerhead in a U.S. zoo.

The joint Northern Ireland-U.S. research, being published Wednesday in the Royal Society's peer-reviewed Biology Letter journal, analyzed the DNA of a shark born in 2001 in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Neb. The shark was born in a tank with three potential mothers, none of whom had contact with a male hammerhead for at least three years.

Where is Jerry Falwell now that we need him?

Let's hope?

From an article on the impact of displaced Iraqis on life in Jordan: Print:

Now he [Firas, a native Jordanian] lives in an apartment he rented with several friends in Amman. Every day he sleeps in a different bed: 'It depends who isn't in the apartment that day.' What about marrying an Iraqi woman, he is asked. 'No, no. The Iraqi women are disrespectful. They're tough and they demand a lot from their husbands. It's the bad education of Saddam Hussein, who granted Iraqi women a high status. Here the women are still polite. Let's hope that the Iraqi women won't ruin them for us.'

Law in action?

Lecturer suspended after breastfeeding fatwa | Reuters:

CAIRO (Reuters) - Cairo's al-Azhar Islamic University on Monday suspended a lecturer who suggested that men and women work colleagues could use symbolic breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together.

The lecturer, Ezzat Atiya, had drawn on Islamic traditions which forbid sexual relations between a man and a woman who has breastfed him to suggest that symbolic breastfeeding could be a way around strict segregation of males and females.

But after controversy in the Egyptian and Middle East media, university president Ahmed el-Tayeb suspended Atiya pending an urgent investigation into his opinions, the Egyptian state news agency MENA reported.

Atiya is the head of the department which deals with sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and the university is part of the al-Azhar institute, one of the most prestigious in Sunni Islam.

Atiya's unusual opinion was widely publicised by Arabic-language satellite television channels and featured in a discussion in the Egyptian parliament.

The Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya quoted him as saying that after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair.

But a committee from al-Azhar said his proposal contradicted the principles of Islam and of morality.

Atiya had said he had drawn on medieval scholarship to justify his position. The opposition party newspaper al-Ahrar on Monday quoted him as saying he retracted his views because they were based on the opinions of a minority of scholars.

W is for (and pathologically against) Wimps and Wussies

From The Los Angeles Times:
With thanks to The Opinionator @NYT:
By Mark Dery

The trouble with manhood, American-style, is that it's maintained by frantically repressing every man's feminine side and demonizing the feminine and the gay wherever we see them. In his book, 'The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity,' clinical psychologist Stephen Ducat calls this state of mind 'femiphobia' — a pathological masculinity founded on the subconscious belief that 'the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman.'

OK, so maybe I'm overstepping the bounds of my Learning Annex degree in pop psychology. But the hidden costs of our overcompensatory hypermachismo are far worse than a few politicians slimed by pundits. The horror in Iraq has been protracted past the point of lunacy by George W.'s bring-it-on braggadocio, He-Ra unilateralism and damn-the-facts refusal to acknowledge mistakes — all hallmarks of a pathological masculinity that confuses diplomacy with weakness and arrogant rigidity with strength. It is founded not on a self-assured sense of what it is but on a neurotic loathing of what it secretly fears it may be: wussy. And it will go to the grave insisting on battering-ram stiffness (stay the course! don't pull out!) as the truest mark of manhood.