Archives for October 2009

I got to review Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, and as highbrow easy reading goes, he’s pretty hard to beat. One of his essays, on the creator of the Pill, provides much food for thought from a pro-woman perspective.

He identifies Dr. Rook’s major error in being maintaining a 28 day cycle for contraceptive pills, which he did in the belief that, by mimicking nature, this method would gain approval amongst Catholics (being one himself). What’s especially fascinating, though, is his look at the research into menstruation in pre-industrial societies.

What he demonstrates is that, in a state of nature, women would have perhaps 100 menstrual cycles in their lifetime, while for women in the developed world today, it can be as high as 500 cycles. Since each cycle involved changes to breast, endometrial and ovarian tissue, and since malignant growths are often found when cells must repeatedly regenerate (why sunburns are linked to skin cancer, and smoking to lung cancer), reducing the number of menstrual cycles a woman experiences should in theory reduce their risk of reproductive cancers. And what evidence there is in this area bears the theory out. The factors in nature that reduce the number of cycles aren’t ones we would like to recreate: late onset of puberty caused by malnutrition, for instance, or a high infant mortality rate. At least one of them, we can influence: breastfeeding reduces these risks, in part because it suppresses ovulation for a time after birth. This is why reproductive cancers have long been known to be less common among women who carry multiple children to term and breastfeed them: each birth would represent anywhere from 12 to 24 months without ovulation.

Now my two major concerns with the Pill are that it sometimes (we don’t know how much) acts as an abortifacient, and that its effects on women’s health are mixed – while it reduces risk of ovarian cancer, the benefits it confers with respect to breast cancer are cancelled by the risks it carries due to, it seems, synthetic hormones. The current Holy Grail of researchers, according to Gladwell, would be a birth control pill that suppresses ovulation all the time, thus reducing the repeated changes that can lead to cancer, as well as preventing the fertilization of an egg, since no egg would be released; and to do this with hormones that would have no adverse effects on risk of breast cancer, or anything else.

So, since I have no philosophical objection to birth control, I find myself thinking that such a Pill would be a very good thing. This is despite my general aversion to medical intervention without a good reason. The impression I got from Gladwell’s essay is that this may be just around the corner.

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Andrea adds: Rebecca’s full review is here.

What a sad, horrible story.

A jury in Saguenay, Que., has found Cathie Gauthier guilty in the premeditated killings of her three children as part of a New Year’s Eve murder-suicide pact with her husband.

[…]

Gauthier was charged with three counts of first-degree murder after the bodies of her children and husband were found in the family’s rented bungalow last Jan. 2 in Saguenay, about 250 kilometres north of Quebec City.

The children — Joëlle, 12, Marc-Ange, 7, and Louis-Philippe, 4 — were poisoned by a mix of Gravol anti-nausea medication and a tranquillizer.

Their father, Marc Laliberté, died of blood loss due to a cut on his wrist, worsened by a heart condition.

The family was suffering from financial troubles and had filed for bankruptcy in October. Laliberté had not worked in months and Gauthier had lost a series of jobs at retail stores.

Financial troubles is never a good reason to kill your children.

Oh boy. There’s an ad with a serious twist.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM3R6_1Ayoo&feature=player_embedded]

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Tanya adds: Speaking of surprise endings (alright, so this one is a bit predictable):

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueVOLY2SPDE]

Not sure how I feel about that theme. But I still wouldn’t mind seeing Motherhood, starring Uma Thurman. (Knowing me, I’ll wait until it’s on the shelf at Blockbuster.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NouMMZwbem0&feature=player_embedded]

One thing I can get on board with: “Motherhood is about accepting things that you cannot control.”

A fun read, especially this bit:

There isn’t a single body of women in Canada that receives federal or provincial funding that is not ideology-driven, and that includes the Liberal Women’s Caucus. The Pink Book III is rife with debunked statistics – for example, that old chestnut about women earning 70% of what men make; come on, we know that figure mainly reflects self- selection out of areas of higher personal demand so that women can spend more time with their children, a choice they happily make.

As for caregiving: Yes, women do more caregiving of those they love and in whose wellbeing they are highly invested. That’s to say there is personal reward in the sacrifice. And men do more fighting and dying in Afghanistan and saving people in burning buildings and slogging through crap in sewers for people they don’t even know, but somehow we don’t hear so much about those crummy jobs whose only reward is honour fulfilled and pride in supporting one’s family.

It’s almost as if men and women are, you know, different, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and advantages and disadvantages.

Wow, now that is a shocking idea. Of course, to admit it would be a truly revolutionary act, and somehow I don’t think we can expect Michael Ignatieff to be supporting those home truths any time soon.

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Andrea adds: I want this job. It’s long been a dream of mine to entirely eradicate Status of Women Canada.  

If an honest gender commissioner were ever appointed, he – whoops, clearly I mean she, ha ha, what was I thinking – would recommend the complete dismantlement of all women’s government-funded lobby groups.

I don’t really have an opinion on whether the “realistic” sculpture of a newborn girl is too offensive to put on Calgary buses. Newborns, especially if they’re other people’s babies, are not always pretty. But I do find the story too amusing not to mention. There’s no end of half-naked pretty young things in objectionable poses everywhere you look, but a wrinkly newborn is too much?

Artificial insemination by anonymous donors has always had a whiff of hubris about it – the notion that you can specify physical and mental traits you’d like in your child’s biological father, as if ordering clothes online (albeit with a worse returns policy) is jarring, as is the fact that it amounts to eliminating fatherhood in all but the most basic biological sense. I don’t have any strong views on the use of donor sperm for married couples wanting a child that is (half) biologically theirs; using sperm from a relative makes a certain visceral sense, although it would complicate relations with the in-laws and extended family immensely.
But whether the procedure is used for frivolous or profoundly well thought out reasons, there are a number of risks implicit in the whole concept. And one of them is that we’re not yet capable of knowing exactly what someone’s genes have in store for them, or how the genes of both parents will combine in any given instance. But this story, about a sperm donor with congenital heart trouble, who fathered 24 children, 9 of whom have this problem as well, should be sobering.
Now of course, this man may well have fathered children “naturally,” and those children would also have a high risk of carrying this gene; a sperm bank is no guarantee of a perfect child, and neither is natural conception. But one of the things fertility clinics sell is the idea that you can choose your baby. And it’s highly improbable that one man would father 24 children the old-fashioned way.

Hey, I suppose that’s good news. Liberal “leader” Michael Ignatieff calls his party’s plan to introduce a national daycare program a “legacy” issue. As far as I’m concerned, it can keep being a legacy issue all it wants, as long as it never becomes reality.

Do we have a deal, then?