Nrrrd Wave

Social justice, socially awkward.

[nrrrdwave]

Ted Cruz and the Existential Terror of Bitchy Resting Face

It is common enough for people to feel misunderstood. But occasionally – often enough for me to be self-conscious about it – people actually don’t understand me. As in, I’ll pose a question that feels relevant to our discussion and grammatically coherent, and the other person will just tilt their head and say “I don’t understand what you’re asking.” Conversations gradually (or suddenly) come unmoored in misunderstanding and I fall into a painful slow-motion awkwardness spiral. I leave interactions wondering if I have a strange accent or spinach in my teeth or something. Having a tendency toward self-critical introspection doesn’t help matters. What is it about me that makes it impossible to connect normally with people? Maybe they can see straight through to my true, flawed nature.

Last week, a couple of articles came to my attention and ramped the anxiety-meter from “jitters” to “despair.”

First, the Washington Post ran an article posting a possible scientific basis for Bitchy Resting Face. The phenomenon (lampooned in faux public service announcements) where human women have faces that aren’t smiling might be an actual thing. Turns out, it may have something to do with a slight squint to the eyes or a subtle raising of the corners of the lips that people read as contempt. Note to self: the concept of microexpressions is the single most self-destructive weapon to the anxious mind.

This was fairly upsetting because I have one of those faces. I don’t know what to say other than it constantly elicits comment. From my two-year-old asking me “are you okay, Mama?” while I’m scrolling through Facebook on my phone, to my co-worker literally saying “my god, your face” as she passes me reading an article in intense concentration. Fortunately I’ve gotten to an age where people no longer actually call me ugly to my hideous visage. “It’s just my face,” I reply, with equal parts embarrassment, defiance, and resignation. Alas, I was born with it and I’ll live with it until I can afford the John Travolta Face/Off treatment -- or at least the Les Yeux Sans Visage economy package. Believe me, nothing in the world is more exhausting than trying to hold your face in an aesthetically pleasing configuration while you’re doing nothing, on the off chance that someone will see you and say something humiliating about your expression.

And then came a Psychology Today blog about Ted Cruz and his “unsettling” face. My initial reaction to him was one of immediate revulsion, like some kind of ventriloquist dummy – an unctuous, sycophantic, mean ventriloquist dummy you just want to get away from. And apparently I’m not the only one who feels that way: Cruz is perhaps most frequently described as “widely loathed.” SNL relentlessly dogged his many off-putting qualities. He’s has singlehandedly popularized the German term Backpfeifengesicht, which translates to “face in need of a fist.” This blog post, written by a neurologist, suggested that Cruz might have something like a cross between the Bitchy Resting Face and the uncanny valley: a face that people just automatically hate. Maybe it’s some combination of the shape of his smile and the tilt of his eyebrows that makes people feel like he’s talking down to them, lying to them, or both. Whatever it is, it’s certainly not something he’s doing intentionally, because it’s no secret that people hate that dude.

And there it is, the saddest and scariest possible realization: it might be possible to have a face people just dislike. Not just find aesthetically displeasing, or angry-looking, but unlikeable. It’s a lot to manage – what you think of people, what you think of yourself, what you think they think of you – without adding in what they think about how you look and what it says you think about yourself and them. It’s dizzying just typing that.

I want to believe that we’re actually simple beings and my occasional feelings of alienation are just anxious delusions, but the truth is that we’re complicated social animals that are constantly reading one another. Maybe some of us are in Comic Sans: the obnoxious form obscures the substance.

[nrrrdwave]

At work on a holiday Saturday working on one of the most viscerally sad cases I’ve ever encountered, after waking up in a world where a young black man was shot a dozen and a half times for nothing and women and the people who serve them are being terrorized for attending to their health, and this song just made me lose it, and made me a little more able to pull it together. 

[nrrrdwave]

An Open Letter to the Abortion Counselor Who Told Me I’d Become an Anti, on the Announcement that Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole is going to the Supreme Court

Hi there.

You probably don’t remember me, given the incredible numbers of women you have to serve. Had to serve, that is, before you and all of your colleagues were probably laid off in the aftermath of the Texas tornado of an omnibus bill that wreaked havoc on abortion access across the state.

I was the one who came in because I wasn’t ready to be pregnant because I’d just accepted an offer to go to law school on a fellowship for human rights follow my dreams across the country. I was the one who grimly watched Legally Blonde in the waiting room and tried to remind myself why I was there.

And then when the experience was terrifying and traumatizing, I am the one who wrote a long note in the follow-up form detailing how the jokes the doctor made were inappropriate and I was having nightmares from the anesthesia. Maybe you know where this is going, or maybe you forgot, but I’m the one you told “women like you end up outside holding signs.”

I forgave you then for the experience, and I told you as much, that I knew the clinics have to bring in doctors and they’re not always who you’d prefer.  For your prediction, I had a little less charity.

Now, a decade and three babies later, I can finally say you were right. Women like me are the ones who end up holding signs. But not outside the clinic. We’re the ones who end up holding signs outside the Capitol demanding sovereignty over our bodies. We’re the ones who end up holding outside of the Supreme Court holding signs calling for justice and to be recognized by the law. And occasionally, we are the ones who end up writing briefs to ensure that those who come after us have an easier time.

Maybe it’s a little belated now, but I just wanted you to know that even though it might feel scary when people have difficult or sad abortion experiences in this time of polarized views, we learn to forgive ourselves and let go of our regrets. Our experiences don’t necessarily dictate our politics.  You can’t control how we feel about an abortion, but you can influence how we feel about the people and institutions surrounding it. We need time, space, and support. And at the heart of it, we need each other, so please don’t write us off.

[nrrrdwave]

“The Kids Are Out of Control!” Anti-Racist College Protests and Liberal Pearl-Clutching Run Amok

As protests against racism erupt on college campuses across the country, they are followed by a tidal surge of take pieces reviving the debates around trigger warnings, safe spaces, and academic freedom from within and without academia. “The kids are too coddled!” they cry. And when student activism on the Mizzou campus actually, surprisingly led to the resignation of the President and Chancellor, “They’re at the castle gates!”

Right along with moral panic about selfies and snapchat, we have been handed a tidily-constructed narrative of Millennial fragility that is in deep tension with this generation’s ability to self-organize and the serious social issues they are rallying around. It is surprising to me, then, to see my goodhearted ‘urbane lefty’ friends bemoaning the death of free speech at the hands of young anti-racist protesters.

Maybe the problem is that it hits a few common chords -- lashing out at Yale students appeals to my own admittedly anti-elitist bent, and protection of all-speech-of-all-types-come-hell-or-high-water is a shibboleth of the civil libertarian left. But maybe, sometimes, if we find ourselves agreeing with people who do things like put the term feminist in scare quotes, we should stop for a moment and ask where we are getting our narrative and whom it benefits.

Case in point: a good, thoughtful friend I respect immensely posted the following video, accompanied by a note about how hypocritical it is that students asking for a POC safe space would silence and ridicule someone sharing their experience of racism and that the ‘safe space’ should be a place of intellectual inquiry with “evidence over emotion” (never mind that people of color’s evidence gets dismissed or written off as emotion...) and that no one race has a monopoly on hurting others (well...)

So I watch the video...

 ... and you know what? The kids are alright.

A few observations:

They don’t shut her down. The tenor of the conversation around this video had me worried that the speaker was going to be booed and bullied. Not so. The woman who is speaking is interrupted by the woman with the sign, which is probably unkind and poorly-timed, but not racist. The whole time, most of the onlookers are telling the interruptor to “let her speak.” Understandably, the speaker then loses her train of thought and then...

She goes on a tangent that misses the entire analysis. What the speaker experienced was awful and her story is valid. But after being thrown off, she retreats into a quasi color-blind “we need to look at people’s hearts, not their race” corner that is not only out of left field, but is actually contrary to the idea of POC safe spaces. It’s not a difference of opinion, it’s a backpedal after being approached by a Black woman that sets her in a tailspin, to which a voice or two shouts “racism is power plus privilege.” As she gets flustered and people get uncomfortable with where this is going, someone gently takes the megaphone from her and back to the organizers. And in spite all this...

The crowd applauds her. As the organizers awkwardly, rightly try to redirect and move on, people insistently applaud for her. It’s not until someone else off-camera pipes up “Black people can be racist!” that the organizers and participants become annoyed. They acknowledge that anyone can hurt others, but that that’s not the point of this gathering, which is about demanding accountability from the institution.

So much for that frenzied mob.

My friend’s concern, as I take it, was with the dismissal of a woman’s valid experience of a racist incident, and this is not illegitimate. But it’s also not equivalent. Someone interrupting a speaker (if I could guess, probably to tell her she has some learning to do about racism, which raises its own questions about calling in vs. out) is not the same thing as campuses turning a blind eye to racist threats or having entire departments with no faculty members of color, or admissions practices that perpetuate marginalization. I have no doubt that there have been other instances in which crowds shout down well-intended people, but this isn’t one of them.

After some years of vacillation, I am skeptical of the “racism = power + privilege” formulation. It’s close, but doesn’t quite get the full picture of the many layers of the internalized, interpersonal, institutional, and structural racism in our society. We must value individuals’ direct experience of racism, and at the same time understand that the fact that white people can experience race-based offense doesn’t negate the existence of racism in our institutions and society. Even in the aggregate (i.e., “many white people have been called by an epithet”), we risk missing the forest for the trees.

And even more perniciously, if we take the easy path of hand-wringing about unruly mobs of coddled kids and indulge the false equivalence between institutions shutting down discussion and protesters interrupting a speaker, we risk missing the harder truth at the heart of the protests. Democracy can be messy, and calls for justice aren’t always polite, but what is at stake is more than hurt feelings or campus safe spaces - it is the actual safety and lives of students of color on and off campus.

[nrrrdwave]

On Tits & Tyrannies: We're Asking the Wrong Questions About Breastfeeding

Several months ago, someone asked a question during a discussion of autonomy and dignity in reproductive health that gave me pause.

What about breastfeeding? It seems as though it is being shoved down everyone’s throats. And now the Mayor wants hospitals to stop giving out formula samples, and the subways have ads promoting breastfeeding, when not everyone can or wants to. It’s shaming.

The speaker, a professor, was livid – her voice quavered like she was on the verge of tears. She didn’t elaborate further, but it was clear that she was having a strong personal reaction to the public health campaign. Like many parenting decisions, whether or not one breastfeeds and whether or not they are supported in that decision can feel deeply significant. Most of us who are raising children have at some point felt the sting of judgment of our parenting. And, no doubt, the increased scrutiny of parenting by state authorities is a destructive force in our society.

But are the public health campaigns in support of breastfeeding bullying parents? Are these campaigns, and the professional and lay lactation consultants who carry them out, promoting a guilt-ridden tyranny of the breast?

Shame and stigma have should have no place in our conversations about people’s reproductive decisions. At the same time, as with analyzing any form of oppression, it’s important to keep clear distinctions between the individual and the systemic.*

Much of the criticism of the promotion of breastfeeding centers on experiences that occur on the individual level. For instance:

Someone on a parenting forum says that parents who formula feed may as well give their babies poison because formulas contain ingredients in jet fuel (yes, this happens)

Someone gives a parent a dirty look or says something nasty when they pull out a bottle to feed their child in a public place

Someone makes a sanctimonious comment about how they just don’t know how someone can bond with their baby if they don’t breastfeed

Someone felt immense sadness and shame after attempting to breastfeed and being unable to

Someone felt exhausted, ignored, or “like a dairy cow” after taking great efforts to start or maintain a breastfeeding relationship, perhaps at the urging of medical professionals

These experiences on the individual level can break out into the internalized (private beliefs that people have, including beliefs about themselves and other people), and the interpersonal (interactions between two people, when private beliefs influence public actions).

What individuals feel and believe, and what individuals say or how they treat other individuals, absolutely matter. But these individual interactions, even in the aggregate, don’t create the cultural context in which we exist. Our cultural context is determined by policies and practices on the systemic level. The systemic level includes the institutional (what happens in institutions and places of power, such as schools, workplaces, and correctional facilities) and the structural (what happens among institutions and across society, including the compounding effects of history, culture, and ideology). On balance, these policies and practices do not favor breastfeeding parents, and point to inaccessibility of breastfeeding for certain populations. For instance:

Workplace protections for breastfeeding parents – including sufficient parental leave to establish a breastfeeding relationship and time to pump upon return to work – lag behind other nations. Only recently did the Affordable Care Act amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to require non-bathroom space to pump and unpaid breaks to do so. This provision does not apply to businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

Though nearly every state has a law permitting breastfeeding people to nurse in public places where they are otherwise permitted to be, most of these laws lack any form of enforcement mechanism.  

While the rate of initiation of breastfeeding has rebounded from historic low points and is now approximately 79%, it varies widely across states, with high-poverty states having lower rates of breastfeeding initiation and even lower rates of breastfeeding at 6 and 12 months.

Breastfeeding rates among women of color, specifically Black and Native women, are lower than those of white women.

People in correctional facilities – including pretrial detainees – are routinely denied equipment to pump breast milk to save for their infant or to relieve pain.

Child welfare authorities intervene against parents who seek to breastfeed while receiving opioid treatment for pain or addiction, even when medical personnel are encouraging fostering a nursing relationship, and even though research suggests that nursing can reduce or eliminate the need for treatment of neonatal abstinence syndrome.

Is “breast is best” the best possible slogan? No. Is it okay for people to snark or snipe at parents who  feed their babies formula? Never. But focusing almost exclusively on the individual to shut down attempts to provide support to breastfeeding parents lets the systemic problems – and they are significant – persist. Casting infant feeding as just another front in the so-called “mommy wars” (interpersonal ideological clashes from which no actual parents benefit), we lose sight of some important truths:

It is not a zero-sum game. Encouraging one infant feeding option does not necessarily come at the expense of people who choose another. If we want to achieve reproductive justice, we need to be able to hold complex realities and provide support for multiple options. We can encourage health-promoting behaviors without devaluing people who engage in other behaviors. We can provide the support that people need to overcome institutional and cultural barriers without invalidating the people whose choices have institutional support.

There are reasons to want to breastfeed that have nothing to do with research or evidence – especially for people of color. Recently, there have been various claims that the touted benefits of breastfeeding are oversold: it doesn’t always make people lose weight quickly, the immune system benefits are marginal, promised IQ points never materialize. But maybe there are things that matter more. Promoting health and parent-infant bonding in communities of color is a radical act of resistance. Native activists are doing inspiring work, supporting breastfeeding as “the first sacred food”: asserting food sovereignty and reclaiming cultural practices. When it comes to tyrannies, the policy throughout US history that Native women are unfit to parent and the removal of their children by force likely ranks higher and cuts deeper than the suggestion that infant formula is something less-than-best. Similarly, under slavery and other forms of servitude, Black women’s breast milk was treated as property of the master and nourished white babies, even at the expense of their own infants. Even today, for-profit groups urge Black women to sell their milk (at a smaller profit, of course), leading Black breastfeeding collectives to question their motives. “Natural” is socially constructed and highly commodified, but there is value in ancestral cultural practices, especially for people whose culture has been targeted for eradication, and for whom every possible health advantage is crucial in closing the gap.

We should maintain healthy skepticism of corporate motives. Some commentators claim that banning hospitals from providing free take-home formula samples further disadvantages low-income women. Corporations don’t offer samples out of kindness.  They know that once the breastfeeding relationship is disrupted, a baby will have to be fed with formula until they are weaned. They also know that women are most likely to use the formula they see in the hospital, and stand to gain WIC dollars from low-income women (for breastfeeding folks on WIC, those dollars go to nutritious foods for the parent, who passes the nutrition on to the baby). These are the same corporations that have been slapped with lawsuits for misleading claims in the US and have been subject to decades-long boycotts for undermining breastfeeding in countries where a lack of clean water can make formula feeding deadly.**

We should not let injustice beget injustice. One frequently cited reason for opposing efforts to encourage breastfeeding is that low-wage workers very rarely have jobs that permit them to pump milk, or money for equipment to do so. But should worker-unfriendly policies dictate how we feed infants? Workplace constraints create an illusion of choice and obscure the real problem, which is that everyone should have the security to transition between care work and work in the market economy as their family’s needs change, and the support to continue to meet those needs.

There has been significant improvement in the rates of breastfeeding, but there is still a way to go until breastfeeding assistance is freely available for as long as it is needed, racial disparities are eliminated, and workers have space and time for feeding or pumping. I’ll be ready to have the conversation about World Breastfeeding Week being oppressive to people who can’t or don’t breastfeed when everyone has the support they need to breastfeed successfully if they want to. That day hasn’t arrived.

* Here I acknowledge an enormous debt to the work of Race Forward for articulating this analysis with respect to racism, from which I draw heavily. I highly recommend their report, and the accompanying overview by the ever-impressive Jay Smooth.

** This is all said with the understanding that corporations are increasingly attempting to capitalize off of breastfeeding, offering lines of milk extraction and storage products. But these corporations (we’ll call them Big Boob), create products that are not strictly necessary.

[nrrrdwave]

Blood in the Water, Alabama Edition, Volume 3

By now, you are probably well aware that Alabama’s breathtakingly activist Supreme Court has reinterpreted the term “child” to include fertilized eggs, ostensibly so that it may prosecute women who use criminalized drugs (under a “chemical endangerment” law meant to keep kids out of meth labs) and put them in one of America’s worst prisons for up to 99 years, but actually to dismantle the right to abortion. Don’t believe me? Go read the concurring opinions from the two cases and tell me if there isn’t an anti-woman agenda there. I’ll wait, but you can save time and just read the line where the Chief Justice Roy Moore grieves “not for the Constitution alone [but] for the millions of children who have not been afforded equal value, love, and protection since Roe” in a concurrence on a case about a woman who gave birth to a healthy baby.

You might have also heard about the Kafkaesque case of Jane Doe, a woman arrested during the first trimester of pregnancy under the chemical endangerment law who requested a court order permitting her to obtain an abortion while in pretrial detention (which would moot the criminal proceeding a la Citizen Ruth). She was threatened with a termination of parental rights to her first trimester fetus to prevent her from having the abortion (spoiler alert: that’s not how the right to abortion works), and then experienced a sudden change of heart after being appointed an attorney listed as a chancellor of a Christian day school. It seems the state struck a deal: if she complies with court-ordered treatment, she can keep custody of the being in her body.

But now it seems that this was just the overture. Alabama is ready to move to the next phase.

While the state has managed to charge nearly 200 women under the “fetus = child” theory, most women who do not use prescribed or illicit controlled substances have managed to evade criminal charges for their pregnancy outcomes because the current definition of a “person” does not permit criminal charges against women for their pregnancy losses or health conditions their babies may have at birth. But SB26, introduced today, threatens to remove that slender protection.

The vast majority of legislative proposals never see the light of day, but to understand why this bill needs immediate and forceful opposition and a watchful eye, it’s important to understand what it means.

It means that anyone who self-induces an abortion at any point in pregnancy commits murder. Anyone who gets toxoplasmosis from kitty litter or suffers a placental abruption from lifting a toddler commits criminally negligent homicide. A woman who wants to have a home birth or a vaginal birth after multiple cesareans commits reckless endangerment. Failing to wear a seatbelt, jaywalking, or any other little risk that we take for granted is elevated to an assault or homicide if something goes wrong with a pregnancy. This is it, every decision about a pregnancy from fertilization can end up having to be defended before a jury.

This is, and always was, about more than abortion. It’s about officially declaring open season on anyone who is or might become pregnant.

[nrrrdwave]

Florida woman dies after choosing to save unborn son - Dallas News | myFOXdfw.com

More on maternal sacrifice in childbearing. It sounds like this was this woman's choice, which I respect, though my heart breaks at the fear she faced in this pregnancy. I also have a very hard time with the rhetoric that makes it sound like the most honorable thing a mother can do is die. It lets us off the hook from asking WHY women are dying, and seeing, for example, that placenta accreta is becoming increasingly common with the high cesarean rate and the low VBAC rate.

[nrrrdwave]

Texas’s Devil’s Advocate Bill: Lawmakers Put End-of-Life Wishes on Trial

Nearly a year and a half ago, Marlise Muñoz’s family had tofight John Peter Smith Hospital for weeks to remove her dead and deteriorating body from artificial support and let her go according to her wishes. Muñoz, who was 14 weeks pregnant when she collapsed in her home, was the mother of a toddler and the sister of a brother who had died just a few years before. Though she had never signed an advance directive telling her family what to do in case she was in a persistent vegetative state, her husband Erick Muñoz, a paramedic like Marlise, said that she had made it clear she did not want to be kept on life support beyond hope of recovery.

The plight of Marlise’s family made national headlines, setting off a firestorm of pontification, from the self-righteous to the sci-fi.  People demanded that the pregnancy be gestated to term and the baby placed for adoption because Mr. Muñoz had constructively abandoned it by honoring his wife’s wishes. Even Terri Schiavo’s brother weighed in, siding with the state. It seemed everyone got to have an opinion but the family who loved Marlise and raised her little son, and cried over her decaying body and held the hands frozen in rigor mortis.

Marlise's Parents, Ernest and Lynne Machado, with her husband Erick Muñoz and son Mateo. Dallas Morning News.

To the State of Texas, neither Marlise’s wishes nor her family’s pain mattered. That’s because Texas has a law automatically invalidating a woman’s advance directive whenever a pregnancy is detected, no matter what her intent for the pregnancy might have been. So even if Muñoz had executed an advance directive, even if she been unaware of the pregnancy, Texas law would ignore her wishes. The law could not be clearer in its cruelty.  According to the language laid out by the statute, every advance directive must recite these words: “I understand that under Texas law this directive has no effect if I have been diagnosed as pregnant.”

Nearly two months after she had expired, a court directed the hospital to remove her body from the machines that made her a bodily incubator of a fetus too compromised to survive. Texas law may disregard her wishes for end-of-life care, her lawyers cleverly argued, but it can’t touch her once she is dead. Advance directives don’t apply to the dead, who curry more respect under the law than pregnant women. 

The heartbreaking story of the Muñoz and Machado family’s protracted double loss was a wake-up call to many women who had never even considered the possibility that their decision about something so intimate as how to live and die could be invalidated by state law.It was a call to action for Texas lawmakers, too, who now want to make sure that not one single pregnant woman perishes in the State of Texas without her fetus having its day in court.

Marlise’s departure from the mortal plane was a "loophole" that Fort Worth Representative Matt Krause has vowed to fill. Though no proposal has yet been filed, Krause has expressed his intent to submit a bill that would appoint attorneys for fetuses in cases like Marlise’s so that the fetuses can take their grieving parents and grandparents to court and demand to be gestated (presumably at the family’s expense; this is Texas after all).

Even in cases where there is no disagreement among family, lawmakers want to ensure that the state gets it say. Every death of a pregnant woman will get an appointed Devil’s Advocate. The contempt for families like Ms. Muñoz’s is palpable: this proposal tells the people who loved her and knew her best that they shouldn’t have had the power to protect her in death.  This also sends a chilling message to desperate women in vast expanses of the state without access to abortion: if you plan to commit suicide, you had better be efficient and effective, or the pregnancy will be carried to term -- with or without you.

[nrrrdwave]

Mother stored frozen, dead baby in Eastpointe garage for weeks prior to disposal in recycle bin, detective says

Angela M. Alexie, 24, a homeless woman who temporarily resided at a home on Gascony in Eastpointe, confessed to giving birth to a baby boy about 1 p.m.on Dec. 22, Roseville Police Detective Brad McKenzie told District Judge Carl F. Gerds III during the woman's arraignment Wednesday. Alexie is now charged with first-degree murder and first-degree child abuse, both crimes punishable by life in prison.

How many layers of things have to go wrong with a society for a woman to go through a pregnancy and birth with nowhere to go to keep herself warm and her baby alive?

But the part that makes me furious is that the staff at the Medical Examiner's office named the baby. There's something so symbolically sick there - this is The People's baby and you've done Us wrong - when the truth is that it's the other way around.

[nrrrdwave]

File under #sorrynotsorry: Nathan Rabin Apologizes for Inventing Misogyny in Film

In 2007, I invented the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl in a review. Then I watched in queasy disbelief as it seemed to take over pop culture

Two things I'm not understanding here:

This guy coined the phrase, but he didn't invent the trope. Did mansplaining exist before the internet invented a term for it? If a girl strums a ukulele and there's no shiftless beta-male to hear it, does the sexism still exist? Yes, I think so; it seems self-aggrandizing to suggest that his own contribution to the lexicon is injurious to the female gender.

Related to #1, I'm seeing a conflation between the thing and the representation of the thing (ceci n'est pas une Manic Pixie Dream Girl?) The thing I really loved about Ruby Sparks was that it is such a brilliant takedown of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, exposing it as a vehicle for insecure male writers to live out their self-actualization fantasies. For the record, I have always felt that the increasingly absurdly young ingenues Woody Allen casts opposite himself or his proxy fit the bill for this, even if I didn't connect it to the MPDG. So I'm very surprised to hear that Zoe Kazan hates the term and doesn't think it applies to her character. Maybe I missed the point of the movie, but it seemed like a critique of the fact that once the female character starts to have independent thoughts and desires, the male protagonist loses interest (see also, Annie Hall). I'm not convinced that the existence of a term to call this out validates it's existence. The trope needs to die, but taking down the WebMD article on cancer is not the same thing as curing cancer. 

[nrrrdwave]

With Woman: A Call to Tennessee Midwives

It is Passover: a holiday I never fully understood growing up as a cafeteria Catholic in the Southwest. I have since come to appreciate the festival, when Jews commemorate the exodus from Egypt, as a celebration of resistance and resilience.

If you don’t know the story, it begins with an act of defiance by midwives who disobeyed the law to fulfill a higher moral obligation.

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah,  “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.”  The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?” The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.” So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.

Exodus 1:15-21

Ordered to carry out an unjust and immoral decree, Shiphrah and Puah recognize their obligation is to the Hebrew women, their babies, and their God. Resistance to legal authority was a righteous act that ensured the survival of the Hebrew babies.

The spirit of resistance is one that has permeated midwifery throughout history. Midwives were healers and keepers of wellness for women and families in virtually every place in time until very recently, even (perhaps especially) in times of persecution and oppression. As we who strive for birth justice are often reminded, the term “midwife” is derived from the Middle English midwyf, or “with woman.” The midwives burned as witches in the American colonies, grand midwives descended from enslaved Africans in the US south, parteras in the borderlands, Indigenous midwives, and the midwives who to this day serve women left behind by medical institutions – all have been called and recognize that their obligation is with women, even when the law is against women.

Right now, the law in Tennessee is turning against women. The General Assembly has approved SB 1391, a bill that would turn pregnant women and new mothers into criminals. It takes a law that was supposed to protect pregnant women from violence and treats them like assailants. It would permit prosecutors to charge women with assault for losing pregnancies or babies, or giving birth to babies with health problems at birth.

The targets of the law are women who are in the most need of support: women who struggle with narcotic addiction during pregnancy. The State of Tennessee is in search of a solution for babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome and the prosecutors have offered … criminal prosecution. They call it a “velvet hammer”; when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. They claim that the law is just a way to use misdemeanor charges to get women in treatment. But if anybody understands the devastating power prosecutors have over people's lives, it's midwives, who in many places face murder charges for losses that would be considered an unpreventable misfortune for other professionals.

Tennessee lawmakers seem to believe that they can keep babies healthy by punishing their mothers. They obviously haven’t been listening to midwives! Because midwives know that mamas and babies do best when pregnant women are treated with care, and when babies are kept close to their mothers after birth. Even women who struggle with addiction love their babies, and can have healthy pregnancies if they can form trusting relationships with their maternity care providers.

An alternative reading of the story of Shiphrah and Puah illustrates the danger of this law. What if the story isn’t about the midwives’ resistance, but about the Hebrew women’s fear? If Shiphrah and Puah were telling the truth, and the women – knowing the Pharoah’s decree – were avoiding calling the midwives until after they had given birth? This is exactly why midwifery organizations have stood against the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes: if women fear arrest and separation from the children they have and the baby they will birth, they will avoid care. Criminalization creates an atmosphere of distrust that is destructive to health and to the bond between mother and baby. 

A call to action.

Despite the best efforts of activists concerned with the health of pregnant women and their babies, this law has passed the General Assembly and is headed to Governor Haslam to be signed into law.

Advocates are circulating a petition, which you should sign, and call the office of the Governor to let him know that he should veto SB 1391 because it is dangerous to mothers and babies and destructive to families. But the calling to be with women is a calling to go a step further, and awaken the spirit of resistance.

The proponents of the bill have insisted that, because there is no reporting requirement in the statute, health care providers will not be required to turn their patients over to law enforcement. Let the Governor know that you will not abandon your patients to the police.

This is a legal form of defiance of an unjust law in service of a higher moral obligation. Your patients who have been pushed to the margins ­­– women of color, the poor, rural women – are in need of your help. From the Underground Railroad to the New Sanctuary Movement, good people have placed themselves between bad laws and people in need. Now is a time for this type of resistance.

There is strength in numbers. This is an opportunity for midwives serving women in all settings to come together, and to form alliances with other health care providers to declare their institutions as safe harbors for women who struggle with addiction. Imagine the powerful message it would send if hospitals sent letters to the Governor and their local prosecutor saying that they will not assist law enforcement in carrying out these laws. Imagine what we could accomplish if every midwife wielded the strength of Shiphrah and Puah on behalf of Tennessee women and babies.