Month: September 2013

Catholic Digest: Pro-life Even at the End of Life

Oops, just realized I have a second article in the latest edition of Catholic Digest.  Do get your hands on this one if you can!  The strength and clarity of the people I interviewed is just astonishing. I wish I had had enough space to include all of what they had to say about making end-of-life decisions for the people they love.

I wrote about the experience of tackling this harrowing subject in a post called “Bright Wings.”  I’m just going to reprint it here (it ran first in the Register on Jan. 17, 2013), because it dovetails so nicely with Thursday’s Bigger on the Inside post.

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I’m writing an article for Catholic Digest about end-of-life issues.  To be more precise, I’m finally writing this article.  I was putting it off because (a) I’m lazy, (b) it involved conducting interviews, and I get very nervous talking on the phone, (c) it seemed like a depressing topic, (d) I was petrified of getting some detail wrong, leading readers astray, and causing the needless deaths of countless helpless grandmas, and most of all because (e) I was scared.  Scared of finding out exactly what the Church actually teaches.

I knew the secular ideas of Church teaching were wrong.  I knew that the Church is not cruel or heartless, and I knew that her teachings are derived from hundreds of years of rigorous scholarship, and are guided by the Holy Spirit.  I knew that sometimes people suffer needlessly because people misunderstand Church teaching.

But I also knew, without even realizing I was thinking this way, that what God wanted from us was awful.  Or, in the older sense, awe-ful.  Scary, hard, intractable, too much to bear.  Without realizing I was thinking this way, I thought I’d have to massage the facts into something more palatable for the general public, so as not to scare people away from fidelity to the Church.

Yep, I thought God would need my help.

I did five interviews in three days, I read the catechism, I looked up the relevant documents, and I got some clarification from Rich Doerflinger.  I did my research with the same internal posture as I take on externally when I’m watching a horror movie that everybody says is really, really good and I shouldn’t miss:  I was tense, defensive, ready to cover my eyes as the hero slo-o-o-o-owly opens the door to see what’s inside the creepy old shack in the woods.

So, I opened the door. I found out what the Church really says about end-of-life issues — how to make the decisions, how to care for people, how to do your best to strike the balance between letting technology do its job and letting nature take its course.

Guess what the Church teaches?  God loves you.  He loves life.  He has life to share, and He shares the light of His eternal life by sending the Church as a support when we are weak.  He sends the Holy Spirit into the ICU and the NICU with the respirators and dialysis machines, into the womb that holds the anencephalic child, into the hospice room with the 80-pound man who no longer wants or needs to eat.

And because He is a God who loves, He is a God who grieves — not only for the sick and the dying, but for the living, who have to carry the burden of their decisions after sitting up night after night without sleeping, without a change of clothes, without knowing clearly if they are causing pain or bringing relief to the ones they love.  That every life is valuable, and that includes the lives of caregivers.  He enlightens the minds of nurses.  He strengthens the hearts of parents.  He brings clarity to grown children.  And He grieves.

What I learned is that the Church teaches, “God loves you, God loves you, God loves you.”  Always and forever, in the darkness of doubt, and in the light of the truth.  This is what is at the heart of all the teachings of the Church; this is what we will always see when we force ourselves to uncover our eyes and watch the story as it unfolds:

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

Holy Cats, Mr. Science! Do you mean to say that population is made out of people?

Op ed in the NYT saying what I’ve  been saying since forever:  Gosheroodie, have you noticed that the history of man is, overall, the history of increasing productivity?  And who figured out how to increase productivity?  Individual people — you know, part of the population.

Someone’s gotta be having the babies.  We all need it.  Spend less time and effort sterilizing poor people, and spend more time and effort figuring out how to help everyone live well.

There really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity. We are nothing at all like bacteria in a petri dish.

Why is it that highly trained natural scientists don’t understand this? My experience is likely to be illustrative. Trained as a biologist, I learned the classic mathematics of population growth — that populations must have their limits and must ultimately reach a balance with their environments. Not to think so would be to misunderstand physics: there is only one earth, of course!

It was only after years of research into the ecology of agriculture in China that I reached the point where my observations forced me to see beyond my biologists’s blinders. Unable to explain how populations grew for millenniums while increasing the productivity of the same land, I discovered the agricultural economist Ester Boserup, the antidote to the demographer and economist Thomas Malthus and his theory that population growth tends to outrun the food supply. Her theories of population growth as a driver of land productivity explained the data I was gathering in ways that Malthus could never do. While remaining an ecologist, I became a fellow traveler with those who directly study long-term human-environment relationships — archaeologists, geographers, environmental historians and agricultural economists.

Very happy with that phrase “I became a fellow traveler.”  He means that he learned along with people who knew more than he did.  And that’s what’s called for here.  I am sick to death of rich white westerners leaning back in their sustainable bamboo chairs and telling everyone else to breathe less.  Treating humanity itself like the enemy — what could be sicker?

This guy gets it.  It’s not about numbers; it’s about people:

The science of human sustenance is inherently a social science. Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future. Humans are niche creators. We transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits.

Two hundred thousand years ago we started down this path. The planet will never be the same. It is time for all of us to wake up to the limits we really face: the social and technological systems that sustain us need improvement.

Read the whole op ed – it’s not long.

Gangster Meatballs

We recently rewatched Goodfellas, and, what can I say? We’re older and fatter, so what we took away from it was:  we have to  make those meatballs.

Okay, so we didn’t do this. But we did go out in the rain with flashlights to harvest some fresh basil. So hardcore!

We are having family over tomorrow, and are making a quadruple recipe.  They are the meatballs of happiness and delight.  You must make them now.  Here is the recipe.   You can thank me later when you recover from your meat delight coma.

Extra cool!

.. . . as my son used to say repeatedly as he launched himself off the couch repeatedly.  But this really is:

They’ve discovered that a common kind of insect hops with the aid of gears:

There was a tiny row of bumps on the inside of each leg where it met the insect’s body. The bumps looked just like the teeth of gears. And when the planthopper jumped, they acted like gears too — as teeth meshed, the legs turned in synchrony. Sutton says his finding, published this week in Science, is the first mechanical gear system ever observed in nature.

Somehow, this makes me feel a little bit better about bugs.

Hoo boy, Mark Twain

Such great stuff here.  I laughed my head off at the Jane Austen one:

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

and this:

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.

and this:

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Especially funny to me because this morning, I woke up and opened a 4,000-word draft I had written late at night.  Editing, I come across this passage: “A gift is given freely; and freedom always leaves room for fuck-ups – otherwise, it would not be free. Otherwise, it would not be a gift.”  My husband said it sounded like something Randy would say.

But this one hit too close to home:

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.

Dammit, Mark Twain.

 

I repent of my early support for the Iraq War

I wish I had listened to John Paul II at the time, and I have learned my lesson.

Pia de Solenni explains why we’re praying and fasting today, and includes links to an Italian/Latin booklet so you can follow along with the Pope as he leads a prayer vigiltoday (Eastern Time 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.) for peace.

TheyToldMeToAbort.com – UPDATED!

Ever had a prenatal ultrasound?  Ever had a false diagnosis based on that ultrasound?  In the course of nine pregnancies, I sure have.  Doctors have told me the baby’s development was weeks behind gestational age; that there was a life-threatening hematoma forming; that the baby’s organs were forming improperly.

In my case, I had good doctors who ordered follow-up ultrasounds, and we were all glad to see that nothing was wrong.

Many women aren’t so lucky.  Here’s something that happens all the time:

[UK mom Sarah] Hagan says that, after a 24-week ultrasound scan of her unborn baby, doctors told her that her son Aaron was “brain dead,” had just one eye and no chance of survival.

The mother of two says physicians advised her to take an abortion drug, even though the mifepristone abortion pill is only authorized to be used to destroy the life of an unborn baby much earlier in pregnancy.

When the abortion drug didn’t work, another doctor informed Hagan her baby needed to be delivered immediately and she gave birth to Aaron, who was born at 1lb 7oz with both eyes  and healthy other than the fact that he was born prematurely — which has left him with chronic lung problems he wouldn’t have had otherwise.

They told her to abort based on ONE ULTRASOUND.  They didn’t even bother to do a follow-up ultrasound, or ask for a second opinion.  The only defects he was born with were the direct result, according to his mother, of his premature birth, which was caused by the unsuccessful abortion attempt.  Here is Hagan with her baby boy:

Hagan is right to sue.  If her story is accurate, her doctors were wildly, grossly irresponsible to counsel abortion and to administer the abortion drug.  It’s just too damn easy for them to say, “Ehh, something looks off here.  Better get rid of this one and try again later.”  They’re afraid they’re going to be sued for “wrongful birth” if they miss diagnosing some problem, and the parents are angry that they got saddled with an imperfect child.

It’s unfortunate doctors have to take legal pressures into consideration when they counsel patients, but at least there should be pressure from both sides, not just pressure to “be safe” and counsel abortion.

There are two ways to combat this horrible trend.  One is to make it harder for doctors to blithely counsel abortion when, even for people with the most utilitarian view of pregnancy, it’s simply not warranted.

Two is to give women a reason to fight back when a doctor is pressuring her to abort.  Here’s where you guys come in.

Anyone want to start a blog or website called Theytoldmetoabort.com?  I’m picturing something very simple:  people submit their brief descriptions of why their doctors told them they ought to abort, and then post a picture of the child they decided to give birth to.  Here’s what they said; here’s how it turned out.

I’ve been lucky.  No doctor ever had the nerve to suggest abortion to me; and if they did, I’d have the support of my husband, my family, and of course my faith.  But so many women do not.  So many women are carrying babies that they love and want to protect, but they are surrounded by people who tell them it’s stupid, it’s irresponsible, it’s actually wrong to give birth to a baby who might have a defect of some kind.

I want to show pictures of babies who were supposed to be imperfect, and turned out not to be . . . and I want to show pictures of babies who were supposed to be imperfect, and are imperfect — but they are still loved and cherished.  It could also include pictures of developmentally normal babies who were in danger of abortion simply because their mothers weren’t married, or were teenagers — but their moms decided not to bear and raise them anyway, or give them to another family.

I think the site should include a page of resources, such as benotafraid.net, for women looking for support in carrying a baby in difficult circumstances.  The idea is not to make arguments or supply all the information.  The idea is just to show the world that doctors say “abort” all the time, and that so many women are glad they did not listen.  Stories, pictures, and links for more information.

So, what do you think?  Or if there’s another name that would get more traffic, go for it!  We want something that a sad and desperate woman is likely to enter into a search engine.

UPDATE –  A reader who is a web developer has volunteered to design and host the site!  Still needed is someone to sort through submissions (I assume there will be spam and hate mail entries).

Super Caring Medical Student Designs Super Caring Uterine Assault Rifle, for the Ladies

Because when your heart is just full of pain for the plight of women, the first thing you do is design a medical assault rifle that fires a copper barb through her cervix


producing a continual low grade infection which will cause her uterus to expel any fertilized eggs, on the off-chance that sperm survived and an egg was released.  Your goal is to make it so easy to use that you don’t even have to be a doctor.

Of course, she may still want to follow up with a doctor if she experiences any of the common side effects of IUDs, such as severe cramps, infection, heavy bleeding, weight gain, irritability, uterine perforations, anemia, life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, and permanent infertility.  One woman discovered that the IUD had wandered right into her liver, the rascal. And one woman ended up having her sternum cracked open to retrieve the device that had migrated all the way into her rib cage.  Ha!  Ladies and their lady problems.

But basically, other than that, it’s one of the safest medical choices a woman can make.   Yes, it’s safe.  Didn’t I tell you it was safe?  Shut up and spread your legs, so I can aim this thing.