egg story update
Here I am in yesterday's amNY:
Nice headline, hmmn?
Also, the story's been picked up by Salon's Broadsheet.
Nice headline, hmmn?
Also, the story's been picked up by Salon's Broadsheet.
posted by JenIsFamous at 2/21/2007 10:41:00 AM
12 Comments:
This just lifts my ass off the can. Egg "donation"--a misnomer already discussed elsewhere on this blog--has been "commoditized"? You don't say. By that, do you mean that this "donation" has a commercial component? Because if you do, I will just point out again that, if we are to assume that your beautiful gift to the world is not to be born in a manger but in an hospital, um, the obstetrician, the somnogram technician, the nurses, the anesethesiologists. . .the midwife if you're giving birth at home. . .a "mohel" if you're Jewish and your son will require a circumcision. . .EVERYONE--THAT'S EV-ER-Y-ONE--IS GETTING PAID FOR HIS OR HER SERVICES!!! It ISN'T charity. You only think it should be.
That's because those of you who like to moralize about "potential" life and its sacrosanctity fail to take certain inconsistencies--inconsistencies that abound throughout our supposedly enlightened society--into account. Consider this one: If Jen Dziura were to actually give birth, say, to Siamese twins conjoined at the head, she could determine after the fact that she wanted to have performed a surgery that would, with a certainty, kill one twin that the other would live; albeit with severe mental impairment. With the alternative being the probable death of both children, Jen's judgment call still would be questioned by the lunatic fringe that exists on the extreme sides of all moral arguments, but for the most part America would just express its sympathy for her, for the impossible choice that like Styron's Sophie Zawistowska she had to make, and we'd all go on about our business. In other words, if Jen wanted to make a life and death decision involving THE ALREADY BORN, she could. But if she merely wants to sell her ova, which has not even been fertilized and is therefore not life no matter how so defined. . .Houston, we have a problem!
Here's another one to chew on: If I want to spend my days in the San Fernando Valley getting paid to have sex with beautiful, large-breasted women*, I may do so. That's called pornography, but it's still legal; the complete waste of perfectly good sperm that might otherwise be used to impregnate someone to whom I'm lawfully married notwithstanding. Wait! It gets better and more offensive to evangelical sensibilities. Did you know that, now that I think of it, I can even operate at a LOSS, and that's cool, too? Yeah. In parts of Nevada, I can PAY a beautiful, large-breasted woman--two or more, if need be--to drain me of my seed. That's Kosher. But what's apparently NOT worthy of going without comment, is sperm "donation".
Or maybe it is. Maybe--and this would hardly come as any surprise, would it?--we mean to subject women to a double-standard. Maybe we're just railing against the sale of ova today because women have ova. Maybe we're concerned that our daughters shouldn't do anything that would potentially jeopardize their chances of marrying well and settling down to raise babies rather than hell. Fitzbilly Darcy might not be so keen on Lizzie after all, when he finds out that she sold some of her ova.
Jesus! What world are we living in, anyway? It's 2007, folks! When will we acknowledge that women are capable of making their own choices? When will we let them make them, without offering all the second-guessing? And when will wise up to the fact that our little girls might have grown up and taken interest in commercial activities not merely relegated to selling Girl Scout cookies or serving as proprietrix of a lemonade stand?
That headline is sexist and offensive. It also happens to be bullshit.
Questions?
* I put some feelers out, but so far no one's called.
I don't see why money as motivation is wrong. That's why people go to work at jobs they hate, money. That's what keeps the medical industry in business, money.
The article (with a Chicago dateline) and photo appear on page A9 of today's Kansas City Star under the headlines: The business of procuring procreation / 'Egg donors wanted' ... and found ......... The photo is monochrome and uncropped. The caption reads: "Having donated eggs before, New York comedian Jennifer Dziura hopes to donate again. She recently waited to perform her stand-up act in Brooklyn." As soon as I read "New York comedian Jennifer" I recognized you and thought to myself, "Wow, maybe Jen really IS famous." Sadly, my next thought was a disappointed, "Rats! No Wonder Woman costume?!" ... Also included: a bar graph showing the number times women donated eggs in federally monitored programs from '96 (around 3800) to '04 (more than ten thousand).
OMG! Once again, "polemicist, pundit, provocateur, and all-around-pain-in-the-ass" Matt Penn hits the nail on the head in inimitable fashion. You're not only a very funny man, Matt, but a brilliant writer who makes me think as well as laugh my ass off. Your point about the Siamese twins was great. A woman can make life or death decisions for her children that pro-lifers don't want her to be able to make for a fetus if Roe vs. Wade is overturned as they hope it will be.
Good luck with those "feelers"! ; )
XOX,
Julie
I'm curious as to what qualifies one to be an ethicist? I have ethics so I'm pretty sure I could do the job. I would want a fair renumeration for my opinion and I don't thing that I would be happy merely to be cited as "one ethicist". I'd want my name in print.
Thank you very much for your kind words, Julie. I do appreciate them.
As for your question, hoverfrog, I have a friend who is a medical ethicist. She holds both an MD and a PhD, and was a Divinity major as an undergraduate. She would be the first to tell you that being a medical ethicist is not so simple a matter as just saying, "Ah, fuck it! I don't see what's the big deal." Medical ethicists are chosen by the boards of hospitals only after demonstrating a broad range of knowledge of medical and surgical procedures, palliative care, aftercare, etc. They are screened and vetted very carefully, and it is not at all an easy job by any contemplation. A great many--though not all--were themselves practicing physicians, surgeons, clinicians, etc. Just as the vocation "medical ombudsman" (yes, it should be called medical ombudsperson considering how many women are choosing that career path now, too) has become specialized, thanks to the morass that is not having universal health coverage for all Americans--but that's another argument for another time--and is a whole curricula unto itself at, for example, The Hunter University School of Social Work, so too is medical ethics extraordinarily specialized.
But to keep it uncharacteristically short and sweet--I know; too late--suffice to say that, just as if you were nominated to the Supreme Court, what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay there; if you take my meaning.
In an ethics class I took in college (as, of course, a philosophy major), a professor told me that a colleague of hers was a medical ethicist who, in her entire career, had only twice advocated ever lying to a patient--
Once was a woman who was prone to becoming hysterical, and who had only 20 minutes to live. If they told her, she'd become hysterical and hospital policy would require her to be sedated. Instead, they told her family, who came in for a Big Happy Visit! And then she died. It was much nicer that way.
The other was a young man who had come from Iran to have his bleeding problem fixed. He was bleeding from, oh, you know, somewhere around his genitals. He was, of course, an intersexed person (a hermaphrodite) and almost certainly genetically a woman. However, it would have been devastating, considering his culture, for him to know that, and the clincher was that this man didn't want to know ANYTHING about his condition (so he probably already suspected something and wanted it to go away) -- when doctors tried to tell him anything about his condition or the treatment he'd be undergoing, he'd brusquely wave them off. So they gave him a hysterectomy and sent him on his way.
Jen
Owing to our respective sesquipedalian styles, Jen and I share an interest in the etymology of words. So after having read her post, I looked up the etymology of the word "hysterical", and was hardly surprised to learn that it came into modern parlance in 1615. "Hysterics" joined our lexicon in 1782; "hysteria" in 1801. That's almost 400 years of what was originally described as "a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus".
It should come as no great shock to anyone to learn that there is no corresponding word that refers to a similar condition endemic only to men.
Sarcasm really doesn't come across well in print. However I now feel fully informed on what it takes to be an ethicist. Thanks muchly.
Of course I realized that you were being sarcastic, hoverfrog, and my intention was only to comment on how being a medical ethicist is a tough job; that's all. I now realize that should go without saying. (Or, certainly, without my saying.)
If I offended you in some way, I do apologize sincerely. I responded to you personally only because you were the one who had made the comment. My bad. But my intention in responding to posts on this blog is always to make a point or to be (I hope) funny; never to get personal. Really.
Please, forgive me. You are very right about the limitations of print.
Peace,
Matt
No offence taken. Clearly my self depreciating tone isn't coming across in print either. If only someone would invent some kind of iconography to portray emotions. It could be called an icotion or something like that.
;-)
The headline could have been
"Womens Eggs are Her Multiple Cash Cows"... lol...
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