There was a news report the other day tolling the death knell for male chivalry in the city because “gender equality” now means men no longer feel obligated by the historic expectation of society to give up their train or bus or subway seat to a woman.
The South Dakota abortion ban and the issue of male reproductive fetal rights suggests we may soon be back into the Wire Coat Hanger debate as a nation. Morality is a personal choice that cannot be legislated from the courthouse or controlled from the pulpit. The abortion issue is, has, and shall always be, a force that rips apart families and pits men against women and governments against its citizens and churches against its believers.
When it comes to that kind of irrevocable change I prefer to turn inward for the intimate enlightening experience. About 18 years ago when I was 18, I dated a “good Catholic girl” who had five sisters and four brothers. Her church and family did not believe in birth control. She was sexually curious and active and the old, awful, chestnut that if you wanted to fool around as a horny young man, you only needed to find a sexually repressed Catholic girl and you each would find a pleasurable release together. I was not her first but she was mine.
I wore a condom during penetration but there were other times playing around naked when, we thought, no sort of protection was necessary. We dated for about a year and then broke up. Three months after the split she was back at my doorstep telling me she thought she was pregnant. I had no idea if I was the responsible party or not but her timeline seemed to mesh when we were supposedly exclusively dating — we broke up because of her infidelity — and I asked her if she had taken a pregnancy test.
Nixzmary Brown is dead. Her stepfather accused her of eating his yogurt and her alleged punishment was her life in his hands.
Today I am haunted by yesterday and the tragic death of Playwright Wendy Wasserstein. She died of lymphoma at the age of 55. Her sister died of breast cancer at 60. Wendy, unmarried, left behind a six-year-old daughter named Lucy Jane who was born three months premature and weighed 1-pound, 12-ounces at birth.
The bottom of an air shaft in a West New York, New Jersey apartment building became a 31-foot deep tomb for one baby and nearly a death sentence for a second. Last week the sounds of a newborn crying echoed throughout the West New York apartment building until residents called 911 to get help in discovering the source of the muffled cries.
In February, my graduate students in Public Health at a major research university and teaching medical school on the East Coast were discussing a new political cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes I brought to class showing President Bush, as a tailor, holding an empty Supreme Court Justice robe in one hand and an “unraveled” wire coat hanger in the other.
The point of that Public Health class was to research crises in Public Health that are embedded in mainstream culture via history, art, literature and mass media entertainment portals. Telnaes has a similar cartoon this morning where President Bush is handing a judge’s robe to his Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts, and Bush is handing over an “unraveled” wire coat hanger to a woman on the street.
Bush says to her, “Here — hold this.” My students, who were all female, incredibly bright and intelligent, and fell into an age range between 20 and 23, did not understand that February cartoon. “I see the robe. I don’t understand the wire coat hanger,” one student said.
In the March 2005 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics the results of a survey were revealed that concerned the counseling of women pregnant with Down Syndrome babies. Too often, the report reveals, women are presented with only the negative side of Down Syndrome:
Mothers who have children with Down syndrome, diagnosed prenatally, reported that doctors did not tell them about the positive potential of people with Down syndrome nor did they feel like they received enough up-to-date information or contact information for parent support groups. Further yet, the mothers report that all of these shortcomings are happening at an emotional time when women have to decide whether or not to continue their pregnancies.
You must be logged in to post a comment.