Here at the Twisty Bungalow it’s All Bertie, All The Time!
It’s a triumph for patriarchy! A brain-dead woman is being kept alive by machines so her cancer-riddled body can bring a fetus to term. According to the Family Spokesman, Susan would have wanted it that way.
Hell, maybe she would have. I know if I were gonna give birth, I’d definitely want to be in a coma. But that, my young onions, is scarcely the point. The point is that Susan Torres has unwittingly become the semi-living Platonic ideal, if there is such a thing, of overwrought patriarchal sentimentality. Come with me now, if you dare, into a bizarro made-for-TV world of the Washington Post, where, in the Life-Imitates-Hallmark Section, brain-dead motherhood is celebrated. The Torrid Cliché Checklist:
- Description of hospital bills as “tens of thousands a week†even though the family website says it’s more like $1500 a day? Check.
- Husband quitting job to be “by wife’s side,†thus hurling family into financial ruin? Check.
- Donations “pouring in from around the world� Check.
- Old ladies on fixed incomes sending “hand-knit baby blankets� Check.
- Requisite gender-identification/Naming of the Fetus? Check.
- Daddy “feeling his child kick for the first time?†Check.
The article contains various repellent concepts, but here’s my personal favorite: “Aside from the tubes and machines she is hooked up to, the tall and athletic Torres looks remarkably wellâ€.
The tall and athletic Torres looks remarkably well! Well, that’s a relief! The woman is teetering at the precipice of hell, pretty much reduced to a warm piece of baby-makin’ brisket, but at least she looks good!
I ask you. Is there not a whatchacallit, an ick factor, to this?
Look, normally I don’t give a flip for ick factors. People who get icked out by stuff are, without fail, letting it ferment too long in their jesusbag consciousness along with some lame parochial superstitions about how people shouldn’t “play God.†I, on the other hand, am pretty sure there’s no purpose to anything, so what’s the difference? People can play God all day long for all I care.
Now, I’m not saying hubris is necessarily an attractive quality in a species. I’m just sayin’ people have been playing God since before God was invented. It’s what we do. For example, guess how many of our planet’s species went extinct–on accounta people playing God– in the time it’s taken you to read this?
Five. Maybe ten.
But when it comes to bioethics, the sanction against playing God usually means “people shouldn’t jack around with the sacred role of the human uterus as defined by the English translation of Aramaic texts written by barbarians and purporting, a hundred or three years after the fact, to relate the wit and wisdom of the ghost of a dead Jew from the Holy Roman Empire.†To which I say, faugh!
Take human cloning, for instance. I’m all for it. In fact, “Clone What You Can And Leave The Rest†is carved into the lintel of the Faster Family Mausoleum. As long as it’s done right, and your clones don’t turn out to be tortured schizoid mutants with permanent PMS who murder you in your sleep or something, what’s the big whoop? You think a little thing like human cloning is going to throw the cosmos into a tailspin? Again I say, faugh!
I suppose it’s no big hitch in the cosmic git-along, either, if some bereaved husband wants to use the non-sentient body of his comatose and dying wife to incubate the son and heir. But Jesus Christ, if you’re ever sitting around the campfire idly musing on this and that and to what extent women are prisoners of our species’ disdain, think about young Susan Torres, described by Newsweek as “a quiet antidote†to Terri Schiavo (as though Schiavo were a toxin), whose usefulness will expire the moment the kid is surgically extracted from her helpless body.
Thanks to Elizabeth McNulty for the link.
“A quiet antidote,” indeed. One tends to not backsass all the males in charge of one’s body when one is comatose. This somehow reminds me of all the “dead mommy” narratives so popular in contemporary culture’s TV and movie plots. How truly excellent to have an almost-dead almost-mommy to fetishize and worship. Finally, patriarchal female-ness reduced to nothing but necessary elements: a fertile womb, no annoying thought processes or verbal abilities, a destiny articulated and executed for her by her man, and (how very fortunate for her) the good fortune to have found such a self-sacrificing Daddy in Charge. And yes, thank goodness that even in the final stages of cancer AND pregnancy, she manages to present a good-looking almost-corpse. The TV Movie of the Week is virtually writing itself.
Hideous. At least there are puppies, anyway.
I’m still learning, so I’m not sure what the guy should have done when his wife collapsed with the stroke. Is the idea that he should have simply let the baby die? (BTW, according to the story, the baby is a girl, not a boy. Also, your estimate of $1500/day for someone under the kind of care this woman is getting seems low. Medical costs today are astounding. I got an angiogram about a year ago, a relatively common procedure: $12,000. Took my breath away, I can tell you.)
And there’s no reason for those prices except for a very screwed-up US medical system, says this expat Canadian with a superior smile.
LeisureGuy, the $1500/day is not my estimate; the figure comes straight from the Susan Torres website.
Also, for the purposes of my vague, opinionless argument, the sex of the fetus makes no difference, but you’re right, it’s a female.
But meanwhile, you ask the question that patriarchy requires you to ask. Patriarchy obligates the dude to perpetrate an exceedingly distasteful and vulgar act, which is to keep his wife hooked up to life support for the purpose of turning her into what is essentially growth medium for an opportunistic parasite that was non-viable at the time of her collapse. Can you picture the tender scene where he puts his hand on the unconscious abdomen, saying, “Hold on there, Suze, in this subhuman condition, just for 5 more months. Just 5 more months!” It’s fucking revolting.
It’s only revolting if you view her as a person rather than as, for all intents and purposes, ‘dead’.
It’s not like he’s pimping out her still warm corpse, he’s just having the baby come to term. She’s in no position to care about it.
Now, the media coverage is certainly disgusting, but they befoul everything they touch.
My question wasn’t really about the patriarchy requirements but about what *should* the guy do, if he is enlightened enough to ignore the patriarchy requirements. From your response, I guess that the proper response would have been to let the baby die when the mother suffered the stroke.
The other version–a mother impregnated when the father is killed–is also seen pretty often, in fiction and in fact. I’m just guessing, but the idea of being able to have the baby without the patriarchal parent being around would be a plus, right? (Again, I’m still learning.)
It’s also a possibility, I guess, that the father in the article loved his wife a lot and wanted the baby to live out of that love–or maybe I’m just totally brainwashed by the patriarchy and that possibility is unlikely.
I guess this didn’t bother me as much as it should, as an individual case. For all we know, this is something she would have wanted. She is in no pain, that I am aware of. I don’t think her husband is being ghoulish, in this case, though you could say the press coverage might be.
It’s an extremely weird, highly unlikely, medically odd case. Hard cases make bad law, so I haven’t been inclined to draw conclusions from this. Were someone to propose, say, impregnating comatose women in general to grow much-needed babies for some reason, obviously that could not be ethical. Or if he were thwarting procedures that could save her so as not to hurt the fetus. That would be more clear-cut.
She was willingly pregnant when she collapsed, and we can’t know what her wishes were aside from what her spouse says. Because who the fuck writes a will specifying what they want to happen if they collapse with an undiagnosed brain tumor while still young, and while pregnant?
Maybe this guy is honoring her wishes, as best as he knows how. Just like Schiavo’s husband was trying to do. There’s no way to wake her up to find out for sure. And if she’s not suffering in the meantime, I guess I can’t find it in me to judge his decision. It’s not one I’d want to make.
I’m pretty grossed out by the whole thing. It’s not a question of what the guy should or shouldn’t have done, nor even what she would or wouldn’t have wanted (and in fact a number of women I know who have had children say that they would want the same thing, if at all possible). It’s just that, as Twisty points out, it’s such a vivid metaphor of the role of woman in the context of an oppressive patriarchy. The case as a whole illuminates patriarchal values rather too brightly for my taste at least.
And also on the sorry-ass state of medical care and its availability to some and not others. Obviously he can’t afford it, but it’s there, and it’s obviously not being withheld from his wife and the fetus she contains. And the fact that modern medicine does offer some miracles that are just not practical to accept within the context of how it is we here in the US have to pay for this service.
And as for the “other version” of this story, it’s simply not analagous unless you have a comatose man somewhere from whom you are somehow (and I just don’t want to think about it) harvesting sperm and using it to impregnate someone (yeah, I think I saw that movie somewhere too, lol). But even then, that doesn’t take five goddamn months and wouldn’t require his bereaved wife, for example, to quit her job and undergo financial ruin. And last I checked, conscious or not, and artificial life support notwithstanding, ejaculation into a clean container is rather less stressful on the body than five months of pregnancy followed by childbirth (or in this case C-section).
And leisureguy also — by the “patriarchal parent” I’m assuming you’re talking about the dude? Please recall that “the patriarchy” does not (at least here at “I Blame the Patriarchy) equal “men.” I think Twisty has a nifty post on this somewhere. It’s entirely possible — and even likely — that this guy’s love for his wife and potential offspring are what is motivating him. No one is trying to deny him that.
PS. Damn, that puppy is cute.
I also find this situation incredibly revolting. In addition to the fact that Susan is, for all intents and purposes, dead, therefore no longer human, I would also point out that some people may take issue with calling even a 24 week old fetus a “baby.” No one can debate that at one time, Susan Torres was a human being. I sense a lack of respect and regard for human as opposed to fetal life in this story, hence my personal revulsion. I do think we should value one over the other, and while it’s a terrible thing to have happened, and hard on her husband, his valuing of a still very prospective life over the dignity of his wife in death, is quite frightening.
LeisureGuy, I don’t like to admit this publicly, but I’m not the Last Word on patriarchy-blaming. There’s more than one “proper response,” and there’s a remote possibility that I’m in a minority when I say that a 4-month-old fetus is not a “baby,” and that it shouldn’t be worth more than its host’s dignity.
I have just interviewed my pregnant sister (who looks like she’s got a medicine ball hanging from her bra; honestly, I don’t know how you people stand it). She says that she would probably be willing to undergo the life-support scenario as long as it wasn’t a financial drain on the family. My sister is pretty much the Anti-Twist, though.
I would assume that the dad is doing this out of love rather than a sense of responsibility towards the patriarchy. I sought to bring another version of my wife into the world when I decided to have a child, knowing I’d end up with someone quite different in many ways but still part of her. This would make it difficult to decide what to do if I were ever presented with this choice.
My choice would ultimately be to go with fate and good health rather than resort to Frankenstein techniques to bring a fetus to term. I have serious doubts as to the health of the child who might be born of a dead mother. My heart would break, but I would not be able to put the corpse of the mother or the potential baby through that kind of intense experimental concentration-camp style macabery.
I have serious issues with people who label fetuses babies or children. I’ve got two testes full of children if you want to be that ridiculous. And it shows how insidious the whole issue of abortion has become. Once upon a time, a fetus was something no one ever saw or wanted to see. A child and a baby was anyone who survived childbirth. It’s only because of the abortion issue that these definitions, which have existed since the beginning of language, have become distorted to prove an untenable point.
Sorry, I misstated that earlier. What some would support, then, is to let the fetus die rather than put the mother on life-support until it could become viable outside the womb, the reason being to preserve the mother’s dignity in death. Thus the female (in this case) fetus would be sacrificed to that end.
That seems pretty hard to me, but I agree that the whole situation is a tough call–one that no one would want to make.
While I find the triumphant “look at how prolifey we are” aspect of this case rather distasteful, I think it is entirely appropriate for the husband to say that Susan would want her body to be kept alive until the fetus reaches the point of viability.
I would, and I’m a pro-choice feminist.
Nothing and no one is served by turning off the life support, other than the vague notion of her “dignity”. Well, being pregnant is a highly undignified state of affairs to begin with (everyone on the planet examines your woman parts along the way). It’s not like she went into a coma and then he impregnated her so that he could have one last child from the vessel of her body. She was pregnant with a wanted pregnancy, which presumably means that she would want the pregnancy to come to term if at all possible. This is not even a case where the life of the mother is at stake. The mother is dead, and allowing her body to continue as fetal life support makes no difference one way or the other. It’s just tragic and sad.
As for “is it a baby?”, 17 weeks (when she collapsed) is generally about the point when the mother can first feel the fetus move in utero (in old-fashioned terms, when the womb “quickens”). At that point, if it’s a wanted pregnancy, I think most people start talking about “the baby,” because that is when you become really aware that there is another life (still growing parasitically, but another life nonetheless) and you can start to imagine it as a fully developed infant. The linguistic shifts between “baby” and “fetus” are very interesting…when we had any medical testing done, particularly tests for genetic disorders and birth defects, we always discussed the status of the *fetus* with the doctor. When we discussed the sex (which we found out at 20 weeks), we talked about the sex of the *baby*. Referring to the fetus in the medical context reflected, I think, the fact that we might not have chosen to carry it to term if there were serious medical defects, but that the sex of the baby reflected our hopes and dreams for the future, even as we were aware that technically we were still dealing with a fetus and not a baby.
Tony, I of course agree with your larger points, but naturally I must pick a nit, to wit: I don’t think people generally consciously set out to uphold patriarchal principle. It’s just that the shit is so deeply ingrained that people often don’t consider that there may be a course of action that doesn’t uphold it.
I agree that we dance around the difference between “fetus” and “baby”, and it would seem by example to be a sort of coping mechanism in the event something goes wrong. I also find the situation tragic and sad, one marked by a grotesque choice to be made, and really a private matter.
I guess my anger should be directed at the language of praise this story generates - it is so clearly similar to the language of the pro-life side of abortion debates that simply take the pregnant woman out of the equation. And while this story may be an example of a woman’s wishes being carried out, it does spark a bit of fear that in the future, government enforced childbirth might follow some women up to and beyond their deaths.
I believe there was a case or two in the UK about a woman wanting her dead/comatose man’s sperm.
Here is what I think.
The distinction between “fetus” and “baby” is one that, as a society, we need to draw at birth. But for individual parents, the distinction is subjective and personal: I’ve seen it phrased as, “it’s a baby if the pregnant woman says it is,” and I think that makes sense. The fact is, gestation takes 40 weeks (ish) because it’s a *process*, and as such, it’s impossible to draw a line and say “ok, this moment right here is when it changes from fetus to baby.” So, w/r/t this specific case, I’m willing to allow the father/husband to articulate what his wife’s wishes would have been, because he knew her, and I don’t.
On the question of symbolism and patriarchy: I think Twisty’s read is a good one, and I agree with it. At the same time, yes; if I were pregnant and dropped effectively dead of a stroke, and it were possible to keep my body alive long enough to carry the fetus to term, then I would prefer that Mr. B. do that. Yes, indeed, there is something gross and upsetting about it; but then, death is often gross and upsetting. I definitely think that keeping a dead woman alive in order to bring a baby to term certainly amounts to devaluing the dead woman’s human dignity, and I hope that her husband and family have a due and proper sense of the weight of that decision. But I’m not entirely willing to argue that the dignity of a corpse is more important than the wishes of the person before she died.
The media coverage, however, is revolting and offensive.
Hey Mandos, wasn’t that a “Law & Order” episode? Bitter first wife burns down sperm bank to keep sexbot second wife from using rich dead husband’s sperm to secure chunk of trust fund? Hot stuff!
More information makes things more complicated!
Other leitmotifs to aid your considerations of the latest and greatest in modern necromancy:
Would you support the idea of a person who was a willing organ donor being kept on life support (once brain-dead) for several days or weeks so that their organs will still be available and fresh when the organ recipients are ready to receive them?
A father has a child with a serious bone marrow disorder; the child has only survived its present age by having regular bone marrow transplants from the father every couple of years. The father becomes brain-dead within weeks of the next bone-marrow transplant surgery; it’s it in his will that he wants his child to receive any possible benefit from his bone marrow in the event of his death. How long should the father be kept alive on life support? Only long enough to perform the first transplant surgery? Not even that long? Should all of his viable bone marrow be removed (and cryo preserved, etc.), or only enough to provide for the immediate surgery need?
A woman who is willingly pregnant becomes brain-dead at 23 or 24 weeks into her pregnancy. The father, to whom she is married, does not want the child and didn’t want his wife to get pregnant in the first place. The woman’s wishes were very firmly for having children and she had tried many years to conceive. Both her family and the husband’s family know all about this conflict; to top it off, the wife’s family is wealthy enough to pay for her to be kept on life support until the fetus is viable outside the womb and will care for the child without the husband’s involvement. Current precedent law suggests that if the husband says the wife would wish to be taken off life support, she should be taken off life support. Should her body be kept alive or not? And if it should: for how long? Until the fetus is viable? Until the pregnancy has reached full term?
Have fun! I certainly don’t have any fucking clue what I would do, aside from assassinating the heads of every major media outlet and working my way down if coverage didn’t cease sufficiently quickly.
I think Dr. B is absolutely correct to point out the processual nature of pregnancy and fetal development. There is no bright line between “lump of cells” and “person”, although I tend to lean toward the rather subjective and potentially shifting standard of “viability,” which is so dependent on medical technology. For various reasons, no one recommended a Jewish background screening until we had the 20 week sono, and at that point, I just couldn’t bring myself to test. I just couldn’t imagine terminating at that point (since it would take a few weeks to test and get back the results). But that’s me and my circumstance, and I have no desire to impose my own decision on anyone else (hence the whole “pro-choice” thing.
I also have to say that I also had the initial “ick” reaction, but the story is local news for me, and I assimilated and passed it by a while ago. But I think I do want to qualify my earlier statement that I would want Lee to maintain my body on life support until the point of fetal viability (or beyond to increase the chances of survival) by saying that I would want him to do it with full awareness of the potential ickiness of it. And if my life could be saved by terminating, I would absolutely want him to terminate (assuming that I were in a coma and therefore unable to make the conscious decision myself). We could always try for another baby, or if that were medically impossible, adopt.
The woman is dead, the fetus is, well, a fetus; it’s the husband’s decision, as her guardian, to make.
Talk of ickiness and the dignity of the dead are a way of imposing viewpoints on a corpse. It’s as idiotic as the talk around Schiavo, ’she’s better off not being hooked up to tubes’. A dead person doesn’t have quality of life issues.
The woman is dead. Her husband is behaving both legally and honorably. It is a tragedy. He wants the fetus they made together to come to term. Perhaps it would be best to leave it at that, and stop second-guessing the motives.
Twisty: I didn’t watch that episode, and I’ve probably seen at most 7 or 8 episodes of Law and Order in my life. But I did get this BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/121586.stm
Note that the sperm was gathered AFTER he went into a coma. I’m not sure if this was the only case.
By the way, did I mention how cute Bertie is? :)
I think the second-guessing of motives is aimed mostly at the coverage, rather than the husband.
The coverage has made her a symbol of the patriarchy, just like Schiavo beacame a symbol of the pro-life movement, and it had a dehumanising effect on both the women. Both were women who were loved by their husbands, but the icky media coverage and lobbying turned them into something much, much less than that.
Is anyone else reminded of the last page of Kenny’s will? “If I should ever be in a vegetative state and kept alive on life support, please, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD don’t ever show me in that condition on national television.”
Download Quicktime movie of that scene here.
I second the ick factor here. We’re entering Margaret Atwood territory now. Anyone want to sign up for handmaiden status?
This by the way is further evidence for the need for research into artificial wombs. If anyone could just germinate a child in a vat at will, then so many other problems would be solved. We could all get vasectomies and whatever long-term female contraceptives there may be very early on. No more control issues over women’s bodies!
I don’t have the stomach to look into it, but I’m puzzled why everyone bypasses the whole question of exactly how medically sound this whole gruesome horror show actually can be. Everyone blindly assumes that Medical Science, the big Daddy of us all, is omnipotent and always delivers benign and naturally pure results.
I don’t feel that way at all. I think of our current medical abilities as positively neanderthal and brutal. And no matter what you think of the Patriarchy and the mother and the media, I question, loudly and forthrightly, the inherent horror of attempting to grow a baby in the womb of a woman in a terminal coma on life support.
It’s just some fascist fantasy come to life from a concentration-camp style catalog of perversions. Hitler’s doctors would never have dreamed of something this unnatural and cruel.
Why is the right wing so fucking afraid of death? You’d think they all had some doubts they weren’t going to that heaven they do everything to cater to.
LeisureGuy, what I’m not getting is why you think the gender of the fetus would be relevant to anyone here, or to feminists in general. If you think that the feminist position on something like this would have anything to do with the gender of the fetus I really think that you’re not getting what feminism is about at all.
Can I just second Tony’s last post?
The whole thing is utterly repellant and horrifying, twisted and perverse.
I’m definitely a pro-choice feminist, but I don’t think of this as sick and perverse at all. The way I look at it, this man almost certainly loved his wife very deeply (if they were starting a family, it’s a reasonable guess) and the only part of her still alive is the baby. Fetus. Whatever.
If I were in his position (which I’m thankfully not, and will never be) I would probably do the same thing–not because I figure it’s her body’s purpose to produce me a son/daughter and heir, not because I’m willing to violate her human dignity, but because I would miss her terribly and hope to see something of her in our daughter’s face when she is born. Hope that she would have enough of the woman I love in her, that part of the life we had dreamed of having together could still be real.
I sense I may be in a minority here. The coverage is disgusting, but most of what the media does these days disgusts me, so no surprise there. You would have to search far and wide to find a more rabid feminist than I am, and I read and enjoy your blog every day–but I think you got this one wrong.
And O/T–Hi, Mandos. How’s Babble these days?
Damn, I may be in the minority, but it is NOT my “body’s purpose to produce [anyone] a son/daughter and heir”. That is just a totally fucked up and creepy way to think about women.
My body’s purpose is to give ME life. I would like to think that the human species has evolved beyond biological imperatives (and I think we’ve overpopulated our habitat already to boot, and don’t need to be producing as many babies as possible to ensure the survival of our species). I know I would never want that to happen to me, but then again I would never be willingly pregnant, so if I’m pregnant and in a coma, something has gone terribly wrong in the first place.
I know that her, what was he, brother-in-law?, probably meant well, but saying that her near-corpse looks “remarkably well” is sort of creepy. She’s not even slightly well, but then I find that a lot of guys way inappropriate things focusing on a woman’s looks without seeming to “get” that they’re being offensive.
Also, it sounds like it’s a race against time to get the fetus to viability before the cancer overtakes the uterus. Sounds like the c-section is going to deliver a preemie, which may not survive anyway.
This isn’t going to be a cakewalk for the father - two young children to care for, one of which may have serious medical problems, no spouse to help out, and he quit his job! I hope his family doesn’t just drop off the face of the earth after this situation resolves itself…
When I was pregnant, I did tell my husband that if something like this happened to me, he was not to keep me and the contents of my womb alive (I used to study reproductive technologies, so maybe I was paranoid).
And I know little about biology, but I really think that my being sentient and healthy helped me gestate healthy babies. I get the feeling this whole thing is a big interesting experiment for the doctors involved.
The medical industry held out the carrot of the baby to help the husband cope with a very sad situation, but in the end, they reap many of the benefits by studying the comatose pregnant body.
If that ain’t the patriarchy, I don’t know what is.
Hi Andrea! Babble is…different, with its periodic Episodes. It’s still running. Now that I have a blog, I comment there less than I used to, and I now rarely ever post on the Middle East, since I’ve basically said everything I wanted to say. The feminism forum is a lot less flamey, I think, but other things are lower-quality now. Audra (and Michelle) still keep the moderation ship afloat. I still hang out there because it is still one of the best boards.
Andrea, I appreciate your viewpoint, but I remain unconvinced that using someone’s unconscious body as an incubator is behavior consistent with loving that person very deeply. To my mind, the dude who would put his family through such a macabre ordeal just because he misses his wife is a dude in the throes of some sort of psychosis. Of course, as the Everly Bros, Gram Parsons and Nazareth so dudesquely put it, love hurts! Vive la difference, and all that. And this is all speculative, anyway.
Meanwhile, Tony and Steph appear to share an anxiety about Frankensteinian medical measures that I admit were previously obscured–from my consideration at least–by the more sensational patriarchy-blaming issues of the case, but which I now view as central to the discourse. Thanks!
As an aside, if you guys wanna chat off-topic, either share with the whole class or get off the pot.
I think its interesting that nobody has mentioned what it would be like to grow up as the child in these various scenarios. I don’t think i would want to subject my children to that sort of high drama and expectation. particularly not in the scenario mentioned above re: husband never wanted kids, wifes family does.
The focus on what the husband wants rather than on the potential kid is another example of how this situation is the poster cluster fuck for patriarchy.
Mandos> The only case I know of in the UK involving a deceased father actually concerned a couple who had been having fertility treatment, and in the process had frozen several embryos. Before the embryos could be implanted, the father died.
Usually written permission is required from the father before implantation occurs, and her court case involved a fight to be able to use these embryos without his written permission.
Of course if he had objected to her becoming pregnant I doubt he would have provided semen in the first place, so she won, and has at least two children now.
Andrea> impregnating someone is not a sign of love, merely of having viable sperm.
I don’t think that you can separate reproduction and emotion so easily.
Sure I can, maybe you can’t, but you have to remember that not everyone thinks exactly like you. That’s the whole point of providing choice and letting people make their own damn decisions. If this is what the woman would have wanted I have no problem with it other than the “ick factor” which I can get over pretty easily as it is none of my damn business. I will say that I think the kid will likely have a pretty messed up life, if not because of medical problems borne of being incubated by a dead woman, then from the emotional BS this guy is likely to saddle it with.
As for the pregnant cadaver-examination business, let me be the patriarch’s advocate: why not? I mean, how else would you find out about difficult pregnancies without, well, studying difficult and unusual pregancies? What if this yields worthwhile information about complex cases that help other women who want to have babies? And if it turns out to be normal, and if she wanted the baby, then is there a real problem? Of course, there is the *financial* problem of the father ruining his family, which is true in this specific instance…
As I alluded to above, impregnating someone seems to me to be a sign of love IF the prospective mother wanted it to be a sign of love. I mean, I’ve got no children of my own, but I’d imagine that having children with someone you love is pretty emotionally profound, and more than just having viable sperm and a functioning uterus.
Twisty: The story is really simple. Andrea used to post on a Canadian progressive politics board called Babble (http://www.rabble.ca/babble). As I understand it (but she can tell it bettter), she left about 2-3 years ago after having unproductive altercations on the feminism forum, which was new (the moderator Audra realized it was missing and put it there) and, when it was not attracting trolls like flies, had porn and DV-debate paroxysms. For some reason, it has quietened down somewhat, probably because Audra is trigger-happier with the banning button. At the same time, I used to post constantly on the Mideast forum arguing with annoying lobbyists in disguise. Unlike Andrea I still post there, but not as often as I used to.
I read this blog for the first time yesterday and it haunted me all night.
So many things are swirling in my head about Susan Torres, I don’t really know what to say here.
My biggest problem is with the husband. If he really loves his wife and children why did he quit his job? No job means no insurance for the 2yr old he already has to raise alone. So the wife’s experimental stuff isn’t covered, the 2yr old’s pediatrician probably is! Staying by her bedside isn’t love, just the appearance of love. Go to work, if anything changes, the hospital will find you!!!!
I see three levels of issue, which have all been raised in various forms above.
One is the husband’s conciousness and motives, as always with other people impossible to really know or understand fully. The best we can probably do with this dimension, in fairness, is to discuss what we might do in a similar circumstance. Debating his motives might be interesting, but its not ultimately conclusive.
The second piece is the media. Here we can carefully examine the transmission of patriarchy. Here the motives are again almost endless in variation, but directly accessible in the texts. The story itself can be pegged in various ways, but almost inevitably it will convey some conscious or unconscious understanding of what is “good” or “right” about the situation. This story is so extreme that some really devastating effects are possible—for example, what is overtly a story about a husband wanting to preserve as much as possible his emotional connection with his depart(ing) wife through their unborn child has as an implicit parallel the preservation of her corpse as a kind of generating meatpuppet.
Finally, there is the medical part of this. A number of posts allude to issues of the prospective child’s health, or what kind of effect a “pregnancy” that is not within a healthy, lively mother might have, as well as to the suspicion that in offering the husband this option, in effect, some pretty catchy medical papers and casestudies will be written. Besides patriarchy and its incessant drive to appropriate pregnancy, we also have to contend with the less direct but potentially more devious medical drive to enhance art despite moral implications, including the art which extends patriarchal control into the womb (that is also at times the science that helps keep fetuses viable which are born to be beloved children).
The clearest targets in this story, for me, are the media communications designed to present this situation as an apotheosis of preserving life. The logical extreme here is to outlaw contraception as potentially preventing life, which (as Tony mentions) leads to the concept of testes full of children. And, incidentally, therefore to a male right to preserve any life by having the right to impregnate at will (which is how we get back to Atwood territory). This is the place where patriarchy gets explicitly produced.
I remain unconvinced that using someone’s unconscious body as an incubator is behavior consistent with loving that person very deeply
I find this a pretty powerful argument, and will have to think on it some more.
Did you have to top this article with such a cute puppy?? He’s so cute, my outrage had dissipated; my brain has turned to trash!
Holy Smokes: He is so frickin’ cute!!
*eyes the thread nervously*
Now, wait a minute. Is medical technology now inherently patriarchal? Difficult pregancies carried to term and preemies living is now a sign of oppression?
That’s taking it too far. That’s viewing pregancy and childbirth not as ways that women can be oppressed and controlled, but as crimes against women in and of themselves.
As for his making decisions for the fetus…he’s its bloody father!
Nervous Thread-Eyer, in my view there isn’t much about our culture that isn’t inherently patriarchal. Art, literature, history, and yes, medical science–hell, even feminsism–are products of the paradigm within the context of which they were created. They could hardly be anything else.
I would be interested to her your views on the practical difference between oppression-of-women and crimes-against-women.
And as for this, or any, dude having contributed genetic material to the fetus, only a misogynist legal system would grant him “rights” that supercede the sovereignty of the pregnant woman.
What bugs me most about this whole story is yet another creepy family with a “Family Spokesman.” Is this a new trend? Everybody is so desperate for their now-down-to-five minutes of fame that they must have a “Family Spokesman” to properly parade their private tragedy of the week in front of the world with all due efficiency and pathos? And why are THEY asking for MY money all the time?
Whatever happened to a dignified “This is my life, this is personal, now get the fuck out of my face.”
What an appalling trend.
I suspect that people who are caught up in these high-profile obscenities don’t really have any choice. They either get badgered by the press, or they get badgered by the press and get to tell their side of things. The Right To Voyeurism: one of the cornerstones of patriarchy.
Twisty, I believe there is that element of it, but I am not totally convinced that a dignified silence all down the line wouldn’t cut the non-story off at the knees.
Guess I just don’t understand that peculiar mind-set that makes people want to spew their most agonizing moments on television in front of a national/global audience.
BTW, happened upon your blog a few days ago and am now a confirmed addict.
Nervous Thread-Eyer reporting in:
I meant that pregnancy CAN be used as a tool of oppression- not all pregnancies are therefore crimes. Just as sleeping pills can be used to poison, not all sleeping pills are murder weapons. And I meant ‘inherently bad’ instead of ‘inherently patriarchal’. I was responding to the Frankenstein crowd.
She has no sovereignity. She’s dead. With her gone, who else could possibly have more right to make decisions about the fetus than her husband and guardian, the biological father of the fetus?
The only way she could have a ’sovereignity’ differing from the husband’s decisions is if she was taken out of the husband’s care- exactly what was being attempted in the Schiavo case. And it’s wrong for the same reason. She’s dead. Her quality of life, her rights and abilities as a living person- gone. Barring a living will or some similiar example of her wishes, the only person who should be making decisions here is her guardian, her husband.
To interfere on ‘ick’ factors is just as ludicrous as interfering in the Schiavo case because the thought of having her starve/dehydrate to death made you go ‘ew’. Right to die, like reproductive rights, are an issue in this country. _Issues of choice do not apply to a dead woman who never made a will_.
She made the choice to become pregnant. To go beyond that is to go to a whole new level of interference in peoples’ lives and personal choice.
I also find the anti-reproductive technology stance in this thread disturbing. Should only ‘natural’ pregnancies be carried to term?
I forget where I read this, but the family’s insurance was *not* the father’s insurance. It was through *her* job, as a researcher at NIH. So the status of their insurance is pretty shaky…when they turn off the respirator and she’s totally dead (as opposed to mostly dead) their coverage is gone entirely (there is even some question as to whether the insurance company will decide that coverage ended when she was declared brain dead).
How patriarchal of you all to assume that the man was providing the insurance coverage.
“How patriarchal of you all to assume that the man was providing the insurance coverage.”
Ha!
:-)
For years, while my husband was in grad school and I was working, it was *my* insurance that covered us both, since he was only eligible for crappy grad student coverage. Now I’m playing stay-at-home mommy for a little while, and I’m sponging off him (what goes around comes around, eh?). It’s funny that it bothered my mom when I was the sole real breadwinner, but it doesn’t bother her now that he is…
Thankfully, large sections of my fallopian tubes were removed at my request years ago. This is definitely creeping me out. While I can imagine that there are women who would want their babies saved at any cost, I can’t help but think that bringing a fetus to maturity inside of a body where there is no person would somehow screw up the final product - the kid. With all of the studies and products out there that are meant to enhance your baby’s intelligence or talents while still in the womb there has got to be some kind of effect in the complete absence of the mother’s voice, actions, emotions.
Plus, the idea that someone might get the bright idea to mandate this medical assistance in spite of the mother’s or father’s wishes makes me want to hurl. Can’t you just hear the meetings at the Dobson compound? Something like this just takes us one step closer to the rights of a fetus overruling the rights of a woman.
She gave birth* to a baby yesterday. One pound, thirteen ounces.
I’m betting we don’t see a lot of follow up coverage as the family deals with the (almost certainly inevitable, at 26 weeks gestation) child’s physical and mental problems in the weeks, months and years to come.
*By “gave birth”, I am assuming they performed a caesarean. The way the news reported it, you’d think she was wheeled into her Lamaze classes and had her husband by her side as she pushed the baby out.
It was a caesarian, and a woman is considered to have “given birth” even when it isn’t vaginal. The WaPo gives the gestational age as 27 weeks, FYI.
I might not be very popular at this point, but has anybody thought about the future? This could be our answer to “test tube” babies…we could artificially inseminate women who are in comas…and then grow babies. I know, I know…that’s just wrong. But, what if….