Truly demented
The mind reels.
So…it’s bad to make efforts to have a healthy (or “fit”) baby, because doing so may reflect eugenicist and biomedical moralist underpinnings.
What, I wondered, is biomedical moralism? Is it a label in common use? Not according to Google, which has never heard of it. I’m guessing it’s a label for thinking it’s better to have a healthy baby than a sick or weak or underweight one, and that it’s better to have a baby without any disabilities than it is to have a disabled baby. I suppose I get the idea in a sense – that rejoicing at health and absence of disabilities carries with it messages about people who lack health and/or have disabilities. I get that parents maybe shouldn’t lean too hard on the health of their new baby in the presence of people who are not so fortunate, but other than that? Should pregnant women and their nurses and doctors not even do what they can to produce healthy babies? Should they voluntarily and knowingly allow babies to be born with preventable disabilities?
In a pig’s eye, yet that’s what these sociologists are claiming, in language veiled by sociojargon.
Also, “pregnant people.”
This makes things easier, doesn’t it? We don’t have to fix the problem of excess maternal and neonatal mortality among minority populations. We just have to queer it.
Yeah, black women might die more in childbirth. But making that stop would be gendered social control, so…
As an asthmatic, I’ve always resented the way asthma was equated with weakness (see Piggy in Lord of the Flies), and I’ve always cheered on asthmatic athletes like Bob Gibson and Mary Jo Fernandez. As someone who had a severe peanut allergy as a kid, when such things were (or at least seemed) rare, I had to learn from a young age to avoid any food that might possibly have peanuts (you don’t know what kind of nuts are in those brownies? I’ll pass), and I’m grateful that people have become much more sensitive to the dangers of food allergies.
But if someone finds a treatment to prevent asthma and allergies while the fetus is still in the womb, I’m all for it. There’s a difference between treating people as fully human regardless of disability or chronic issues and working to prevent those disabilities or issues in the first place.
So all the people who put in time and work to help me overcome anorexia (and live) were probably being body negative. And I agree with WaM; as an asthmatic, I feel anyone who tries to help me breathe when I am turning blue is my friend.
This new “queering” has achieved maximum sickness and demented…I hope. I hope hope hope it doesn’t get any lower than this.
I know all the grievance studies tend to be interconnected but I really can’t tell where queer studies ends and the disability studies begins…
As someone who actually does hold “eugenic” beliefs I’m really not sure where “having healthy babies is desirable” strays into that territory.
There is perhaps a glimmer of a valid point lurking amid the pomo. Take, for instance, this anecdote from a message board for expectant mothers:
This seems to me to be an undeniable example of “‘safety first’ approaches result[ing] in additional social control over women and their everyday lives.” I’ve never been pregant myself (thank god), but I’ve heard more than a few anecdotes about busybodies taking it upon themselves to overrule a pregnant woman’s perfectly reasonable choices about food, drink, or medicine, all in the name of fetal safety: a barista refusing to give a pregnant woman decaf coffee, a pharmacist refusing to dispense a prescribed antifungal cream, and so forth. I very much believe that the sight of a pregnant woman awakens HAL-like tendencies in some people (“I’m sorry, D̶a̶v̶e̶ Dana, I’m afraid I can’t do that”).
Following up on my previous comment, as I see it, the central questions here are these: to what extent should the goal of optimizing fetal health constrain the choices of pregnant women, and to what extent should these constraints be legally, medically, and socially enforced? I don’t think anyone is seriously arguing that it’s fine and dandy for a pregnant woman to smoke a pack of Marlboros every day and then slam back a fifth of scotch every night. But what about a pregnant woman who has a slice of Camembert every now and again? In absolute terms, the risk that she will become infected with listeriosis is extremely low—but some degree of risk does exist, and listeriosis causes serious birth defects. So is she ethically remiss? Should the decision be taken away from her— for instance, should a waiter refuse to serve her a cheese plate?
In several states, women can be (and have been) convicted of fetal endangerment for using drugs or alcohol during pregnancy. If we provisionally accept that this is just,* then exactly where should the line for fetal endangerment be drawn? Should smoking while pregnant be a crime? What about continuing to take antidepressants? Exercising too much or too little? Refusing to give up coffee? Surrendering to the siren song of soft cheese? When and to what extent should a pregnant woman be permitted to engage in behaviors that are suboptimal for fetal health?
As I see it, these are interesting and important questions, although I rather doubt that the paper in question does them justice.
(*I haven’t researched the issue deeply, but as I understand it, fetal endangerment laws have the perverse consequence of preventing drug-addicted pregnant women from seeking help managing their addiction.)
When the smoke rises upward: I get the impression this isn’t just about the control measures over women’s bodies (I agree with you to some extent, but I do believe that pregnant women have a responsibility to the fetus if they are going to carry to term). The way I read it, even the woman making the choices to lead to a healthy baby is suspect for them.
It is not unusual for a doctor to take a woman off certain types of medicines when she’s pregnant. Sometimes there are alternatives that can be used without harm to the fetus, and sometimes the potential risk to the woman outweighs whatever risk factors there are to the fetus. For instance, when I wasn’t sleeping, my doctor advised me to drink a glass of wine at dinner. He assured me the baby was far enough along that it wouldn’t hinder development, and I needed sleep. When I had a UTI, the doctor prescribed an antibiotic. The risks of the UTi, he felt were greater than the risks of the antibiotic.
Most women want to have healthy babies. For some reason, this is being criticized. We should not discriminate against those who have disabilities, but there is something extremely perverse about suggesting that wanting healthy babies is eugenics, or is in some way a bad thing. This whole “identity studies” field has gone so far off the deep end they ended up in the Mariana’s Trench. Maybe the pressure will get to them enough to come out of the water.
I can’t help but think of the whole “Deaf Culture” movement, that opposes any attempts to cure deafness with, for instance, cochlear implants. It’s a bizarre and perverse approach to child welfare, to insist that keeping the disability is somehow the more righteous choice.
Ah yes, that’s a good analogy.
Freemage: It’s the logical consequence of insisting that deafness itself isn’t a disability.
I feel like that’s a really strong parallel to the trans thing. The use of euphemistic language seems kind, but because it obscures an important truth, it leads to undesirable, unkind results.
This similar to the claim by trans activists that those defending women’s dignity, health, and safety against boundary-breaking trans identified males don’t really care about women at all, they are just using this faux concern to cover their anti-trans bigotry. WOMEN? WHO CARES ABOUT WOMEN? YOU JUST WANT TO HATE TRANS!
It’s a little harder to come out and say CHILDREN? WHO CARES ABOUT CHILDREN? They’re giving it a good honest try, though. They’re basically saying that those who are alarmed at the potential risks to fetal development posed by the hormonal stew that trans identified females take while chasing the impossible dream of becoming men don’t really care about the health of children at all.
Painting infant health as some sort of eugenicist fetishization rather than a good in and of itself is a bold move, as is the sop to women’s bodily autonomy and health choices, but if they didn’t need to do the latter, they wouldn’t have. Forced teaming it is, then. If the health of children is made an issue, it has to be turned around against those making it so, by whatever means. It sounds ludicrous to us (just as TiM claims of the lack of actual concern for women sound ridiculous), but probably doesn’t sound demented to partisan ears when run through the TRANSlator.