Remembering Dr. Tiller 4 Years Later

Four years ago today, I was teaching high school. I heard on the radio or read an article about a doctor being murdered.

I didn’t consider myself a religious person, not then. I was just starting out on my spiritual journey. But even then, I heard the news and thought: aren’t churches meant to be safe places?

Even The Wire, after all, depicts Sundays as a ceasefire day.

I heard about a doctor being murdered while volunteering at his church, among his community, before God. He was murdered. The story stuck with me. It started following me around, interrupting my tasks with questions and worries.

I emailed my feminist friends. Four of us  gathered for weeks to have Tiller Talks, conversations about what Dr. Tiller’s death meant, what role we could play in preventing future murders, what we as individuals – as young feminist women – could do.

We wrote long lists of ideas — hosting movie nights, supporting abortion funds, cultivating dialogues with “the other side”, signing petitions, training to be abortion providers or airplane pilots — and debated what our tiny contingent could do, all of us young and eager, just starting out in our adult lives.

We didn’t have money or clout, but we had passion and conviction.

In the intervening years, one of us volunteered for an abortion fund, one conducted research on abortion, another sent thank you cards to other late-term abortion providers. We all did the tiny and not so tiny things we could, in Dr. Tiller’s memory and honor. But for ourselves as well.

Thank you, 4000 Years for Choice.

It feels right, real and good to work under the light of our passions. The flame that ignites from learning of an injustice grows to a fire with time. We do not live in a world where we murder people whom we disagree with, and as a religious person, as a feminist, as a woman it is my duty to stand up and say “this is wrong.”

Today I also think about Beatriz in El Salvador, who has lupus and is 24 weeks pregnant with a fetus that has no chance of surviving after birth. I think of the Salvadoran Supreme Court, who is denying her a life-saving procedure.

I think of Savita. I think of the countless women whose names we do not know, who died because they had no access to a simple medical procedure, who self-induced abortions, got unsafe abortions, who had no one to stand up for them. History is filled with these women. They are our ancestors, our relatives, our neighbors.

I think of what it means to live in a world where we let women die.

I think of the accident of birth — here, in LA, I have a say over what happens to my body, have access to the medical care I need, can afford an abortion; but in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile — if I’m pregnant there and need an abortion, I have no say. I wouldn’t have control over my own body there, wouldn’t have a say about my own health. Someone else would get to decide what happens to me – a court, a president, a doctor, a husband – determining whether I live or die.

I think of the abortion providers I know and love. I think of their courage and conviction. I think of the legacy Dr. Tiller left us, how he trusted women.

If you don’t own your body, what do you really own?

Help Me Pick New Glasses: Crowd-Sourced Decision-Making

I’m getting new glasses. Warby Parker ones. I got a new prescription (lots of pupil dilation to get that fancy new paper!) and I want a new look. Plus all the cool kids are wearing them. They were even on NPR. (But I knew about them way before that, just so you know. For street cred purposes and all.)

At The Standard, this kinda posh kinda skeezy hotel in downtown LA, there’s a Warby Parker Readery which really has nothing to do with reading and everything to do with trying on the glasses. So here are the three I’m deciding between:

Option 1: Ainsworth (Chestnut color)

Option 2: Marshall (Sassafras color)

Option 3: Ainsworth (Tortoise color)

So what’s your take? Complaints about the lighting & my lack of smiling have already been lodged. Compliments on my Clark University inspired earrings are welcome. But ultimately, what about the glasses? Which ones?!

Notes on Citizen Who by Eric Liu: What If US Citizenship Was Earned?

Last night I walked down the street to the neighborhood theater (what up big city living), and saw the debut performance of Eric Liu’s Citizen Who.

As an immigrant myself, I loved Liu‘s mediation on what it means to be an American citizen. Like all good storytellers, he interspersed personal stories rich with detail and surprise turns with broad summarizes that brought together the disparate threads of theory and history. The same story – that of how his  mother came to the US, for example – was told multiple ways, and through that telling the audience saw the slippery category of citizenship, the way immigrants, or those who look like immigrants can suddenly become “foreign until proven otherwise” or exist in a perpetual in-between-ness of tenuous belonging (to paraphrase Liu).

Since we’re such a new country, and have little common history, customs or beliefs to bring us together (at most, the eldest of our lineages are only about 14 generations), belonging is the central tenet of the American dream. But belonging is both a legal status (Never give up your US passport!) but also a social status (Do you look American?). Liu points out that citizenship, while repeatedly mentioned in our beloved Constitution, is never once defined. In times of doubt, those who were once citizens can suddenly become a “non-alien” or “other”. So this “we” of “we the people” cuts both ways: we, as citizens, are responsible for what we have done and accomplished. Both the horrible and the great. We are one nation, indivisible, despite all that divides us. “In” and “out” are not the only categories here; because of our “color-coded legacy” (Liu’s spot-on word choice ), sometimes citizens and non-citizens not only look alike, but are sometimes the same person. We may have the right papers, but can still be treated as an outsider.

One non sequitur in my notes that I have been mulling over: Freedom is made up of simple pleasures. No matter the context of the suffering, people dream of escaping to experience the same things: mouth-watering meals, the sensation of soft touch, light and airy gatherings with laughter.

One particularly riveting question Liu posed was: When is loyalty dissent, and when is dissent loyalty? What is the threshold for us to participate? As equal parts patriotic and dissatisfied citizen, I appreciated Liu’s call to participate in our democracy, to contribute to our community as a way of rekindling, reviewing, reigniting our citizenship vows. What if we earned our citizenship, rather than were given it by birthright? What if it were renewable, based on whether one participated, served the common good? We are, after all, responsible for our own country.

There are photos here, and you can even watch the whole video of last night’s performance here. And they say there’s no good live theater in LA! Ha.

Placebo Effect: The Wonder (Non-)Drug

I love the placebo effect. It’s like Real Life magic, where something happens that makes no sense, but in a good way, and you can’t explain why or how very well but it’s awesome.

To give a simplified example for the uninitiated: let’s say you have two picky twin cousins who drink only filtered water when clearly tap water is just as good (and often better). Both cousins are thirsty. You’re bring one twin tap water, and the other twin filtered water (because you’re an evil scientist with no regard for ethical considerations). They both think that their water is filtered. The drink it up and say thanks. Ding! Doesn’t matter if the water actually was filtered or not – as long as they think it was, it tastes just as good.

Now there are problems with this small example and it can’t be applied across the board (the difference between a brand name and generic drink might taste different, for example), but it’s a starting point.

Now when doing research with lots of people, we see the placebo effect in groups. We’re trying to figure out whether taking a new medicine is better than not taking it, for a certain group of people. For example, whether taking a new medication will help people feel better more quickly. Let’s say we convince 20 people with headaches to participate in our research experiment. Of the 20 total participants who so graciously are giving us their time, 10 people get the treatment (the new medication) and 10 people get something that looks and tastes like the treatment (the placebo). Maybe we check in with them an hour after taking their pill, and 7 out of 10 people in each group feel better. Those that got the new treatment (the new medication), we might think they feel better because of taking it, but those who got the placebo and feel better…what’s their deal? As a researcher, you might get a little diddly-ish.

It’s brain magic. And um, feeeelings.

There’s some new research showing that different personality traits may be associated with higher likelihood for experiencing the placebo effect, and that sometimes even placebo surgery can be just as good as real surgery.

It’s also a big surprise because it messes with, subverts, troubles our understanding of how things work. You have a headache, so if this pill makes headaches better, and you take the pill, your headache should go away. Real simple, right? But what if you just think the pill works, and you take what you think is the pill, and your headache goes away. Then what? Then placebo, yo. Your brain and body conspired to make your headache go away. You thought it would, and it did. Go, brain, go body, it’s your birthday. (In the sense that every day is your body’s birthday because it’s producing new cells and stuff alllll the time.)

TL;DR: The brain and the brain-body connection is all kinds of awesome. Doing something to try to improve your health may work, even if it’s not clear why that particular something works. As long as you believe in the treatment (and it’s harmless), it might be enough.

Turkey Time & Helping Others Get Blogging

Every Thanksgiving, I get the same song stuck in my head:

Maybe it’ll be stuck in your head too now. Thanks a lot to my sister, who likes to sing this song as loudly as possible.

After helping make sweet potato pie, and eating a lot, and talking, I spent the rest of my Thanksgiving evening helping a fabulous 62-year-old I met tonight create a blog. She has a lot of opinions and learned how to use Skype recently, so I wrote out a step-by-step guide and we practiced posting a couple times.

Spreading the writing love, y’all! What’d you do this Turkey Time? Do your grandparents blog or tweet or facebook?

Los Angeles to the Bay Area: Traffic, Cars Riddled With Bullets, Fog

Reporting live after a 9 hour drive from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, including sitting on the freeway due to disabled cars (crashed, stalled, and towed) 10 different times, narrowly missing witnessing a high speed shootout, and driving through fog. Highlights of the trip: seeing dogs in other people’s backseats. Lowlight: Realizing I’d been walking around the grocery store with my pants unbuttoned, and worse still: no one told me. Here’s hoping the drive back is less exciting!

Post-Gastroenterology Observations: New Reasons to Be Thankful

It’s funny how spending a couple of hours observing how other people live, — hearing about their experiences of living in and with their body –, how that insight can radically change my own perspective. After spending some time around people with gastroenterology issues, I have several new items to add to my list of things I’m thankful for:

– the ability to produce saliva, which allows me to consume food without it getting stuck in my throat and allows me to speak without pain

– not having h. pylori

– working in a field where I can wear fashionable shoes to work instead of clogs

– not being constipated for 3 days or going to the bathroom 20 times a day

– not having to resist the persuasive enthusiasm and at times moral concerns inherent in interactions with drug reps

– that every pain I’ve experienced has been temporary and treatable

– that I didn’t spend my birthday or holiday hours away from my home in a waiting room

– that there really are compassionate and clear providers, with good bedside manner who can communicate well with people who are hurting

– that not every doctor has bad handwriting (some are not only legible but even pleasant to the eye!)

A Thanksgiving Poem: Max Coots’ A Harvest of People

As it’s Thanksgiving week here in the US of A, I’m sharing a Max Coots poem I heard today. It’s fitting for this week: food and friends and the way time gallops by sometimes and creeps by other times.

A HARVEST OF PEOPLE

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people.

For children who are our second planting, and though they
grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may
they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where
their roots are.

Let us give thanks;

For generous friends with hearts and smiles as bright
as their blossoms;

For feisty friends, as tart as apples;

For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers,
keep reminding us that we’ve had them;

For crotchety friends, sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and
as elegant as a row of corn, and the others, as plain as
potatoes and so good for you;

For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts and
as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes;

And serious friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle
as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as
dill, as endless as zucchini and who, like parsnips, can be
counted on to see you through the winter;

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time,
and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;

For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold
us, despite our blights, wilts and witherings;

And finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past
that have been harvested, but who fed us in their times that
we might have life thereafter.

For all these we give thanks.

Max Coots

 

Remembering Audre Lorde 20 Years Later

It’s Saturday night and the house is filled with the not-so-distant voices of neighbors and friends, visitors and housemates. Snippets of conversation float in from the kitchen, and I am here, a little antisocial, looking up poems by Audre Lorde. She died in 1992, at 58 years old, before I had ever heard her name.

Some of the reasons I love her have nothing to do with her writing. For example, she was a librarian. Like me, she attended Columbia University. She put words to intersectionality, a concept so ubiquitous at conferences and academic conversations that the world seems myopic prior to its nomenclature. I love the perfect symmetry of the five letters of her first and last name, that each one ends with the letter e.

Two great New York City organizations bare her name: The Audre Lorde Project, which serves queer people of color, and The Callen-Lorde Center, which provides primary care services to the queer community.

I’ll end with one of my favorite Lorde poems, which deals with one of my favorite topics (adolescence). It’s sweet and accurate, and I rarely see it out and about. Savor with me, now:

Progress Report

When you do say hello I am never sure
if you are being saucy or experimental or
merely protecting some new position.
Sometimes you gurgle while asleep
and I know tender places still intrigue you.
When you question me on love now
shall I recommend a dictionary
or myself?

You are the child of wind and ravens I created
always my daughter I cannot recognize
the currents where you swim and dart
through my loving
upstream to your final place of birth
but you never tire of hearing
how I crept out of my mother’s house
at dawn, with an olive suitcase
crammed with books and fraudulent letters
and an unplayed guitar.

I see myself flash through your eyes
in moments caught between history
and obedience
those moments grow each day
before you comply
as, when did washing dishes
change from privilege to chore?
I watch the hollows deepen above your hips
wondering if I taught you Black enough
until I see all kinds of loving still intrigue
you growing more and more
dark rude and tender
unafraid.

What you once took for granted
you now refuse to take at all
even I knock before I enter
the shoals of furious choices
not my own
that flood through your secret reading
nightly under cover.

I have not seen you, but
I hear the pages rustle
from behind closed doors.

Audre Lorde [1971]

 

Ruminations on Savita Halappanavar’s Death: The Difference Between The Law and Its Application

Surely you’ve already heard of Savita Halappanavar’s tragic death in Ireland on October 28th of this year. Go on, read the article if you haven’t already. I’ll wait.

I’ve been listening on the radio, reading, thinking about the heartache her husband and family feel, about the protests in India and Ireland. About the medical providers who saw her suffering and are likely suffering now themselves. I’ve been rolling the facts around in my head: Savita was 31 years old. A dentist. A Hindu. Since 2008, Savita was living in Ireland with her husband, Praveen Halappanavar. She was organizing the Diwali festival in her community. Savita was 17 weeks pregnant with a desired pregnancy, then she miscarried. When she went to the Emergency Department, she requested an abortion and was denied one.

Some facts I do not know the answer to but wish I did: How well did Savita or her husband Praveen know Irish abortion law? What support did she and her husband have during the miscarriage? What influenced the decisions made by the medical personnel treating Savita? What had occurred in prior incidents when other women had come to the hospital in the midst of a miscarriage? What are the repercussions for denying a patient the necessary treatment? Who provides illegal abortions in Ireland? If a woman is unable to travel to the UK for an abortion, how does she access these non-medical and likely unsanitary and unsafe illegal abortion providers? What are the medical providers who treated Savita thinking and feeling now? When they talk with their beloveds at night, what do they say about this story?

Hearing about Savita’s autopsy report, we learn that her death was caused by septicaemia, and E.coli ESBL. However, these conditions were caused not by the miscarriage she was experiencing, but by a miscarriage of the law. By delaying the one treatment that would have likely saved Savita’s life: an abortion. I am certainly no expert on Irish abortion law, but after some searching I’ve learned that: Despite the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, which not only made abortion illegal but also punishable, since 1992, Ireland explicitly allows abortion in order to save a women’s life.

Ah yes. The law has been adjusted (20 years ago!), but public opinion, provider knowledge and attitudes and skills and training…take time to change. The systems in place to prevent women from receiving abortions (including the kind that save their lives) has been around much longer. Maybe medical providers were uncertain, unskilled or afraid. Change takes time. Eventually, the miscarriage was removed from Savita’s body, but by then it was too late. Too much time had passed.

It is not the law itself, but the interpretation of the law that determines whether it is followed. The law is a blunt instrument, and when applied without clear interpretation, without ample knowledge by those affected, the results are often tragic.

This also presents an example of how a geographical location and its associated laws supersede nationality and religion. Because of the borders a cartographer drew around this land, our rules are different from those of the land next door. Rights you had back home are no longer accessible to you. It didn’t matter that Savita wasn’t Catholic, and wasn’t from Ireland. The decision-makers had decided long before she arrived.