In the People’s Republic of China, an approach has been adopted to ensure that all children born as a result of the one-child policy are healthy. The World Health Organization/United Nations Children’s Fund (WHO/UNICEF) has encouraged the Chinese Government to embrace this philosophy. Part of this approach has resulted in an attempt to increase the breastfeeding rates. This report describes a visit by two nursing faculty members of a Canadian university to an urban hospital maternity unit in the northeast of (...) China, where the staff were attempting to incorporate this philosophy into their maternity care with the assistance of nursing faculty members from the local university. The method chosen to integrate this philosophy was the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative initiated by WHO/UNICEF. (shrink)

In the United States, roughly 1 out of 4 births takes place at a hospital certified as Baby-Friendly. This paper offers a multi-disciplinary perspective on the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI), including empirical, normative, and historical perspectives. Our analysis is novel in that we trace how medical practices of “quality improvement,” which initially appear to have little to do with breastfeeding, may have shaped the BFHI. Ultimately, we demonstrate that a rich understanding of the BFHI can be (...) obtained by tracing how norms of gender/motherhood interact with, and are supplemented by, other normative, historical, and institutional realities. We conclude with suggestions for practical revisions to the BFHI. (shrink)

The study of infant social cognition is the study of how human infants acquire information about people. By examining infants’ sensory abilities and the stimulus characteristics of people, research can determine what information is available to infants from their social world. We can then consider what social environments are appropriate for infants of different ages. This paper examines the sociocognitive competencies of human infants during the first 6 months of their lives and asks how these competencies are functional in the (...) daily social ecology of the human infant. Select examples of research with other species are used to illustrate how the adaptive significance of sociocognitive abilities could be more fruitfully explored in studies of human infancy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Prayer for the BabyKatherine J. GoldWe didn’t talk much about religion in medical school. Rightly so, it seemed to me at the time. I didn’t know how or why it would fit in to my patient care other than respecting patients who used their faith as a coping strategy. I was not at all religious and didn’t like the thought of talking about such things with patients. And (...) in my clinical experiences, it rarely came up.When I got to my last year of school, I signed up to work for a month with an obstetrician–gynecologist in her outpatient clinic. I don’t recall how I met her but remember she was respected for her outpatient teaching so it seemed like it would be a good experience to work with her. (I’ll refer to her by a fictional name here.)“Call me Maria,” she told new patients, enveloping them in a warm, supportive style. They did, and I adjusted to her caring approach, shadowing her as we saw patients during pregnancy, those with abnormal uterine bleeding, patients with pelvic pain, others needing pelvic surgeries. It was an odd experience for me, six months pregnant myself, to be seeing other patients during their own pregnancies.One day, about a week in to my rotation, a couple came in together for an appointment two weeks after an early miscarriage. I watched Dr. Copeland (as a student I just couldn’t call my attending by her first name) give them a hug and we sat down. She asked how they were doing and they shared their story, tears flowing as the mother recounted her emotions over the last week and support from their friends. I had the impression that they attended the same church as Dr. Copeland from their conversation. At the end of the visit everyone stood up.“Shall we pray?” Dr. Copeland asked, and they all took hands. I edged back, away from their small circle, uncertain what to do. I had never seen prayer in medical practice and certainly not initiated by the doctor. Not being religious myself, I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know the protocol. This was not a setting where I knew what to do. So I leaned [End Page 200] quietly against the wall, trying to be unobtrusive, feeling my baby kicking while I watched. All of them bowed their heads and Dr. Copeland said a brief prayer. I watched the mother as her shoulders relaxed. They said “amen” and squeezed hands and hugged one last time. I thought about that interaction for weeks afterwards. I was uncomfortable, but clearly the patients were not. If there were a role for religion in medicine, I reflected, this might be a place for it. It had been accepted by the family without hesitation, so somehow Dr. Copeland knew it would be alright. It had been used in a healing way.There were several other visits where Dr. Copeland prayed with patients. Sometimes she seemed to know them from her church; at other times, I wasn’t sure. But there never seemed to be a misstep—patients never seemed surprised or awkward with her approach. Did they choose her because of shared beliefs? Did she have a reputation of using faith in her practice and patients selected her for this reason? I wasn’t sure. But it was always the same. They would bow their heads and pray. I would stand back a little uncertainly, but the patients were always grateful and appreciative, thanking Maria by her first name as they left.As I spent more time with her, I looked for other ways that faith might impact Dr. Copeland’s practice and asked questions when I thought there might be relevance. I knew from others that she was opposed to abortion, though I never heard her talk about it openly and I was unsure how this might be manifest in her practice. I watched her prescribe birth control (I knew some religious physicians who did not). I watched her send a patient with a second trimester fetal death to the hospital to be induced for delivery. I wondered if someone... (shrink)

Nonhuman animals always have played a significant role in people's lives. Lately, the technological and market economy has anthropomorphized dogs to human-like behavior, particularly to status of family member or child. This qualitative study expands upon the current studies on consumption and animals and society by exploring how human-canine relationships are anthropomorphized at the family excursion to "Yappy Hour" at Fido's Barkery. The type of person who attends Yappy Hour on a weekly basis has a unique and special type of (...) connection with their dog that goes beyond most people's relationships with dogs. Most of the dog lovers interviewed do not perceive their dogs as dogs; they are family members, best friends, and "fur babies." These dog lovers also do not perceive themselves as dog owners; they see themselves as mothers and fathers. The social and market environment of Fido's Barkery not only reinforces their relationship with their dog, it shapes community, friendships, and personal identity. (shrink)

This study examines the effects of sex and familiarity on Americans’ talk to dogs during play, using categories derived from research comparing mothers’ and fathers’ talk to infants. Eight men and fifteen women were videotaped whilst playing with their own dog and with another person’s dog, and their utterances were codified for features common to infant-directed talk. Women used the baby talk speech register more than men, and both men and women used this register more when interacting with the (...) unfamiliar dog than with the familiar dog. When playing with the familiar dog, women talked more than men, and their talk was more suggestive of friendliness and having a conversation. When playing with the unfamiliar dog people used more praise, more conversational gambits, a more diverse vocabulary, and longer utterances than when playing with the familiar dog, suggesting that when playing with the unfamiliar dog, people pretended to have more of a conversation, were more attentive to appearing friendly and were less attentive to the dog’s limited understanding. Overall, however, men and women used similar forms of talk when interacting with a dog, whether familiar or not. (shrink)

Pets are truly great companions. Some individuals feel that owning a pet can help them prepare for a growing family by giving them a taste of what it would be like to have children. This study also looks into the psychological well-being and life experiences of LGBT fur parents. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: (1) With the presence of fur babies, participants had the ease to overcome stressful events, especially the ones that affect their (...) mental health. With these, they have the desire to take care of their fur babies under all circumstances because they see their fur babies as family members. Fur babies are excellent sources of motivation, confidence, and happiness for fur parents. They are treated as family members because they contribute to the mental and emotional aspects of fur parents. Moreover, the majority of respondents valued their pets far more than their actual family members, however, some didn't spend as much time with their relatives and friends. This study comes to the conclusion that a stronger bond with one's dog was also linked to higher anxiety about being unloved and rejected by family members and people surrounding us, which was linked to a heavier impact on one's psychological well-being. In reality, fur parents, especially LGBT parents, offer their fur babies a lot of love and attention compared to other things. (shrink)

This article is a discussion of the recently emerging critique of pro‐breastfeeding discourses in academic literature, and what this means for midwives and other professionals who find themselves promoting breastfeeding because of professional expectations or indeed workplace policies. Various strands in the debate are explored, starting with dominant and familiar ‘evidence’ and descriptions of breastfeeding and breastmilk that are carried through to international policies that advocate breast over formula feeding. We then consider evidence predominantly from social science literature that has (...) found some women's experiences of infant feeding to be at variance with the dominant pro‐breastfeeding ideology. We argue that midwives and others delivering maternity care are the means to deliver the policy aspirations contained in the World Health Organization (WHO, 2018) Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative document that makes selective positive claims about breastfeeding without adequately considering its potential drawbacks. We conclude that although the benefits of breastfeeding tend to be exaggerated in promotional material, on balance the weight of evidence still favours breast over formula feeding. We challenge the charge that breastfeeding jeopardises women's financial position by arguing that it is not breastfeeding per se that impacts negatively on women's economic prospects, but rather the way in which society is socially organised. (shrink)

Four decades after the Baby M case that led to the prohibition of commercial surrogacy in New York, much has changed in the infertility industry. Advanced technologies including the advent of gestational carrier pregnancies had made it easier and more efficient to create IVF embryos at a distance and over time, accelerating a boom in cross-border, reproductive services and allowing compensated surrogacy to flourish in a growing number of surrogacy-friendly states and beyond. For international couples, the USA has (...) become a hot spot for “circumvention tourism” given its first-rate medical care, ample supply of willing gestational carriers, burgeoning interest in family building among gay couples, and immediate USA citizenship for the child. This commentary reviews selected sociocultural and global forces that helped set the stage for the passage of the Child-Parent Security Act in New York state in 2021, and the efforts by its opponents for stronger protections not only for gestational carriers, but for gamete donors and the donor-conceived offspring. I argue that despite more responsive medical and legal guidelines, the high market demand and economic profits, combined with the lack of regulatory teeth, faulty assumptions about health risks and decision-making autonomy, and inadequate research on long-term health outcomes, continue to make compensated gestational surrogacy in the state of New York a high-risk venture without adequate informed consent. Possible unintended consequences and future research questions are proposed. (shrink)

Progress in genetic and reproductive technology now offers us the possibility of choosing what kinds of children we do and don't have. Should we welcome this power, or should we fear its implications? There is no ethical question more urgent than this: we may be at a turning-point in the history of humanity. The renowned moral philosopher and best-selling author Jonathan Glover shows us how we might try to answer this question, and other provoking and disturbing questions to which it (...) leads. Surely parents owe it to their children to give them the best life they can? Increasingly we are able to reduce the number of babies born with disabilities and disorders. But there is a powerful new challenge to conventional thinking about the desirability of doing so: this comes from the voices of those who have these conditions. They call into question the very definition of disability. How do we justify trying to avoid bringing people like them into being? In 2002 a deaf couple used sperm donated by a friend with hereditary deafness to have a deaf baby: they took the view that deafness is not a disability, but a difference. Starting with the issues raised by this case, Jonathan Glover examines the emotive idea of 'eugenics', and the ethics of attempting to enhance people, for non-medical reasons, by means of genetic choices. Should parents be free, not only to have children free from disabilities, but to choose, for instance, the colour of their eyes or hair? This is no longer a distant prospect, but an existing power which we cannot wish away. What impact will such interventions have, both on the individuals concerned and on society as a whole? Should we try to make general improvements to the genetic make-up of human beings? Is there a central core of human nature with which we must not interfere? This beautifully clear book is written for anyone who cares about the rights and wrongs of parents' choices for their children, anyone who is concerned about our human future. Glover handles these uncomfortable questions in a controversial but always humane and sympathetic manner. (shrink)

John and Mary have fully consensual sex, but they do not want to have a child, so they use contraception with the intention of avoiding pregnancy. Unfortunately, although they used the contraception in the way in which it is supposed to be used, Mary has become pregnant. The couple decides to have the baby, whom they name ‘Ernie’. Now we fill in the story a bit. The universe is causally deterministic, and 30 years later Ernie performs some action A (...) and thereby brings about event E. We also stipulate that Ernie meets plausible compatibilist conditions for acting freely . That is, we suppose that there are no uncontroversially freedom- and responsibility-undermining conditions present in the context in which Ernie performs A, and, further, that Ernie meets plausible compatibilist conditions for acting freely. Let us say, for example, that one adopts the theory according to which the freedom-relevant condition on moral responsibility is that the agent exhibits ‘guidance control’ of his action and . On this approach, one acts freely in so far as one acts from one's own, suitably reasons-responsive mechanism. We can then simply stipulate that, in the relevant context, Ernie acts from his own, suitably reasons-responsive mechanism . If one prefers a different set of compatiblist-friendly conditions for acting freely, one can simply stipulate that Ernie meets them; indeed, the plausible compatibilist-friendly conditions seem to be compatible with each other, and thus Ernie could presumably meet all of them in the relevant context. In such a case, and given that the epistemic condition on acting freely and moral responsibility is met, I am inclined to say that Ernie …. (shrink)

What is the good for human persons? If I am trying to lead the best possible life I could lead, not the morally best life, but the life that is best for me, what exactly am I seeking?This phrasing of the question I will be pursuing may sound tendentious, so some explanation is needed. What is good for one person, we ordinarily suppose, can conflict with what is good for other persons and with what is required by morality. A prudent (...) person seeks her own good efficiently; she selects the best available means to her good. If we call the value that a person seeks when she is being prudent “prudential value,” then an alternative rendering of the question to be addressed in this essay is “What is prudential value?” We can also say that an individual flourishes or has a life high in well-being when her life is high in prudential value. Of course, these common-sense appearances that the good for an individual, the good for other persons, and the requirements of morality often are in conflict might be deceiving. For all that I have said here, the correct theory of individual good might yield the result that sacrificing oneself for the sake of other people or for the sake of a morally worthy cause can never occur, because helping others and being moral always maximize one's own good. But this would be the surprising result of a theory, not something we should presuppose at the start of inquiry. When a friend has a baby and I express a conventional wish that the child have a good life, I mean a life that is good for the child, not a life that merely helps others or merely respects the constraints of morality. After all, a life that is altruistic and perfectly moral, we suppose, could be a life that is pure hell for the person who lives it—a succession of horrible headaches marked by no achievements or attainments of anything worthwhile and ending in agonizing death at a young age. So the question remains, what constitutes a life that is good for the person who is living it? (shrink)

A deaf lesbian couple who chose to have a deaf child receive a lot of criticismA deaf lesbian couple in the US deliberately tried to create a deaf child. Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough hoped their child, conceived with the help of a sperm donor, would be deaf like the rest of the family. Their daughter, five year old Jehanne, is also deaf and was conceived with the same donor. News of the couple choosing to have a deaf child has (...) only been revealed with the birth of their son Gauvin.1–4To increase their chance of having a deaf baby the women sought a deaf sperm donor from a sperm bank but were told that congenital deafness is “precisely the sort of condition” that disqualifies would-be donors. Rather than dismiss the idea they found their own sperm donor by asking a deaf friend who comes from a family with five generations of deafness.1The women, both professionals in the mental health field, insist that they would still love …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Plausibility in the Greek OratorsThomas A. SchmitzWhen Tzvetan Todorov edited a special issue of the journal Communications on vraisemblance (verisimilitude) in 1968, he described the origin of the concept as follows (I paraphrase):One day during the fifth century B.C., there was a trial in some Sicilian city. Neither the plaintiff nor the defendant could produce witnesses or any other form of evidence to corroborate their version of the events, (...) so they had to convince the judges by the sheer power of their arguments. This was the day the principle of vraisemblance was discovered.Todorov's tongue-in-cheek explanation refers to a concept which in Greek was called. The word combines two aspects that modern logic differentiates: the "objective" meaning of probability (what is probable by the laws of nature) and the "subjective" meaning of plausibility (what the addressee of a message considers plausible). Aristotle's use of the word shows that the Greek concept does not draw a sharp distinction between these two elements.1 Their intricate connection becomes evident in, e.g., his Rhetoric (2.25 1402b14-16) where he defines enthymemes. They are drawn from probability, he explains, when they are based upon things which occur regularly or are perceived to occur regularly (). The same definition combines objective, purely statistical probability () and subjective plausibility ().Ancient rhetorical theory in general highlighted the subjective aspect, as is evident in the definition of that Anaximenes (?) gives in his Rhetorica ad Alexandrum (7.3.4 1428a27-35): [End Page 47]Plausibility is achieved if the listeners have examples of what is said in mind. To wit, if somebody were to say that he wants his fatherland to be great and his friends to be lucky and his enemies to be unlucky and similar things, this, in short, will seem plausible. For every listener is aware that he himself has similar desires about these and like matters. Hence we must always take care in our speeches to secure our listeners' concurrence in the matters about which we are speaking. For they are likely to trust these statements most.Anaximenes thus defines as an attentiveness to the public's assumptions rather than an objective quality inherent in certain facts. His aim is to train future orators. Whereas a philosopher such as Aristotle wants to explore the very foundations of rhetorical persuasion and thus is interested in all aspects of, orators will be concerned with persuading their audiences instead of speculating about the laws of nature. Yet it could be argued that the modern distinction is largely illusory. Even the most "objective" probability must appear probable to someone; if there are no observers bringing in their own experiences and presuppositions, there is no probability.From its earliest period, Greek oratory made extensive use of this concept. It is impossible to pinpoint its exact origin2—it probably was "discovered" several times. Anastassiou's suggestion (1981, 358-60) that was first used as a means of reaching a decision in cases of insufficient evidence and was not employed by orators as a strategy of persuasion until later3 strains the imagination. As soon as there was a case of insufficient evidence, both parties were sure to use to further their point of view, trying to persuade the judges of the plausibility of their [End Page 48] version. From early times, certainly was no less a means of discourse than a tool of knowledge about the world.One of our earliest examples for this rhetorical use comes from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. When Apollo accuses Hermes of having stolen his cattle, Hermes answers that he, a mere baby, is not likely to be a cattle thief (, 265). So far, discussions of this passage4 have seldom mentioned one important feature: Hermes is lying. Against all appearances and probabilities, the mere baby did indeed steal Apollo's cattle. Thus not only is the author of the hymn familiar with this particular form of argument, he also knows that it can be employed deceptively. His use of the device appears to be a playful parody of arguments that he considered typical of court speeches. This seems to presuppose that at the time of... (shrink)

This paper grows out of a story. A friend of mine got his girlfriend pregnant, in the usual way. He did not want to be a father, though he was willing to help pay for her abortion and to support her emotionally through the experience of abortion (his first choice); or (his second choice), he was willing to help pay her medical expenses for the birth and support her through the experience of giving birth and then relinquishing the child for (...) adoption. What he got, however, was his nonchoice, what he did not choose at all: she had the baby, kept the baby, and he became a father, with financial and emotional responsibilities to meet for the rest of his life. Throughout the decision-making ordeal, he became increasingly frustrated that his fate, his future, depended almost entirely on her choice. He had to wait to see what she would decide to find out whether or not he would have a lifelong identity that he wished to reject. If she chose abortion, he would have no obligations to this child, for there would be no child; if she chose adoption, he would have no obligations to this child, for such.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Difficult Road to Deciding on CircumcisionAnonymous TwoAnonymous TwoWhen I got my results back from my noninvasive prenatal testing, NIPT and found out I was going to have a little boy, one of my first thoughts was, "I don't want to circumcise him," which sounds silly because I just found out the gender of my baby and my first thought is about his genitalia. The idea of growing (...) and carrying this perfect little baby for nine months and then hurting him was unthinkable to me. I simply did not want to hurt him. The idea of it made me feel sick. Anytime the subject came up, I would protectively put my hand over my belly. And I do admit there were a lot of times I wished I was having a girl so I didn't have to deal with the circumcision debate.There was a lot of conversation between myself and my husband about it. My husband was adamant about getting it done. He referred to uncircumcised penises as "snake penises" and said our son will be made fun of for being different. He said it would be easier for him to clean and when he's old, he won't have to worry about infection. I would counter with, "well what if he falls in love with a girl from a culture that doesn't circumcise? She will think his penis is weird." The more we talked about it, the more ridiculous it felt thinking that far in advance and all these hypothetical situations he might get in over his penis. My parents wanted it done for religious reasons, but that wasn't a factor for me. My mom kept saying it's in the Bible and it needs to be done. My boss is Jewish and she joked that I could just convert to Judaism and the choice would be taken away from me so I didn't have to stress over it. Everything I read on my mommy groups and sites like Reddit called male circumcision child abuse and stated how barbaric it was. Terms like "genital mutilation" were thrown around a lot, and I didn't want to be part of a group that was seemingly looked down upon by so many.I spent my whole pregnancy saying how much I did not want to circumcise my baby. About a week after he was born and we were starting to get settled, my husband started to call around trying to get him an appointment for circumcision. It was unusual to do it this way, as typically it's done when babies are still in the hospital. But the hospital wasn't doing circumcisions because it was elective, and they weren't doing elective procedures because of COVID. At his first doctor's appointment, I talked to our pediatrician about it. She is Indian and told me she didn't circumcise her boys and said that it was very normal in many parts of the world to not do it. I would watch her pull back the skin to check it for fibers and think, "Is it really that bad to keep it? It's just skin." Our pediatrician didn't do it, as she doesn't perform procedures in the office, and she gave us some names of doctors that were supposed to be doing it. My husband called them all and none of them were doing circumcisions either. Finally, my husband found a doctor, but he was booked out for almost a month and a half. With no other option, we made the appointment. I was not thrilled about it, and made my husband do all the calls and arrange it because I did not agree with it.What made me change my mind about circumcising him was I didn't want him to be different. My husband assured me this was the best choice and he was very concerned our son would be bullied for being different. I have a good friend that is a nurse in a long term care facility currently. I called her and asked if it was really that bad for old men to care... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Brit Milah for Eliezer Herschel ben Yonatan AryehMolly SinderbrandFor observant Jews, the choice to circumcise one's son is not a choice. Technically, it is a contractual obligation; the belief is that male circumcision is part of a holy covenant with God. The word for ritual circumcision, brit milah or bris, literally means "covenant [of circumcision]." Circumcision is a physical symbol of a relationship with the divine. It is (...) the commandment that encompasses all other commandments. It is, thankfully, only required of men (women, they say, are naturally closer to divinity). Circumcision is when a baby boy enters the Jewish community, eight days after birth, and when he gets his name. He becomes somebody. To choose otherwise— and some may choose otherwise—is to choose not to be part of the contract, and by extension, not be part of the Jewish community. And a community is one of the most valuable things a person can have.I was not always an observant Jew, though I was raised in a Jewish household. I essentially fell into observance over a period of 10 years, starting with studying ancient Hebrew with a language-loving rabbi in high school and eventually leading to weekly attendance at an orthodox shul, which I joined shortly after first tasting the vegan cholent at kiddush. It was much easier to make friends in [End Page 91] the Jewish community than in my competitive and mildly misogynist graduate program, and frankly, I liked them better. I received kindness and support when I needed it, and gave it back equally, especially around having children. Having children is difficult under any circumstance, but it is especially difficult in social settings where it is seen as abnormal, strange, or even selfish. The Jewish community normalized having children and created a respite from the judgment of the secular world. When I was pregnant at work, I got comments like "It looks like you're having twins!" and "Are you sure you don't have pre-eclampsia? You look awfully large"; at shul, I got pep talks, encouragement, and the traditional "b'sha'a tova"—"may it happen at a good time."Eventually, after having two kids in a two-bedroom rowhome, my husband and I moved to a mostly-Jewish suburb just outside the city. It is the kind of place where everyone says "Gut Shabbes" (a good Sabbath) to each other on Saturdays, but not one in which all the men wear black hats and study Torah all day (though some do). That is, folks live Jewish lives, but interact with the outside world as well. After a few months, it felt like home.This was the context in which I decided—or rather, did not have to decide—to circumcise my son. It was the natural result of the decision to be part of a community that places value (and even membership) on the ritual of circumcision. I made that decision years earlier and have been continuously reaffirming it since. Every day I wake up is a day I decide to be an observant Jew, and I decide to do so in order to be a member of an observant community. The decision to circumcise was yet another decision to be part of that community, which has given me so much joy, support, and meaning. Why would I deny my son—and myself—that community?In addition, not needing to make any decisions was itself a kind of relief. I have heard of mothers—including my own—off in a room crying, needing comfort, unable to be there for the circumcision. That did not happen for me. Despite a history of rather severe perinatal depression and anxiety, including suicidal ideation less than a week before the event, I was completely fine. Maybe my comfort came from the fact that I already had two children; this was not my first newborn, though it was my first bris. Maybe, after almost two years of COVID, circumcision did not seem like such a big deal. Maybe I was just glad someone else would hold the baby for a while. But I think at least part of it was the happiness that... (shrink)

Dominic Wilkinson suggests that one of Schubert’s songs has relevance for neonatologists today. In the song, Schubert suggests that death sometimes comes as a friend. Wilkinson ponders whether the song has a message for doctors and parents, who sometimes struggle to figure out whether death is an enemy or a friend to a dying baby. Wilkinson reflects on the case of baby ‘Hal’, who was born with serious cardiomyopathy. Hal’s parents and doctors disagree about whether to withdraw life-support. (...) Through his recreations of their discussions, Wilkinson shows how hard it is to confront—and maybe even welcome—death for a child. While adults often frame their own decision to forego life-sustaining treatment with thoughts that they have lived a good life, death in childhood can seem unfair because it robs the child of their opportunity to live a good or completed life. Much as we try, we cannot really imagine what a critically ill neonate experiences or desires. We have very little insight into Hal’s interests or subjective experience. Without direct access to the child’s experience, it is impossible to know whether, like an adult, a child would choose to allow death to occur. We cannot verify the claim that the child’s death was good in the sense that it was good for them. Wilkinson proposes that a prolonged dying process …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:398 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Becky Thompson In the Slip Between Coasts Every morning the sea announces the day intimate crashing against the high stone wall we scan the waves for black dots floating becoming new moons and then arms waving rafts carrying the world Cartography in Greece after Zeina Hashem Beck’s “To Hamra” Here is the Oleander bush where a family (...) hid before their walk up the hill from Eftalou to Molyvos after eating eggs and croissants in my seaside room thirteen pairs of shoes lined up on the patio slate Here is seaweed beach where one raft landed in perched sea another behind carrying the elders and children Becky Thompson 399 stalled, taking in saltwater coast guard delayed in Petra sea ten, twenty, fifty minutes shouting and prayer finally a rescue exhaustion lining every pore They say memories fade, mine multiply, a cacophony tossing Here is the beach where the Syrian man strapping muscles and whimsical eyes gave me his salmon shirt with a finely made collar his friends ordered selfies called home saying yes began the climb to Mytilini defiant, alive There were moments of freedom jubilation in the air rest on the beach with dates and cool water children tossing stones into the sea lovers sitting close, feet in Europe cell phones that worked, telegraphing safety What does it mean to miss the intimacy of disaster? Now rescue teams mechanic pick-ups intercept rafts before shore whisk people away to Skala Sikamia then Moria no time to touch sand rest with the breeze Here is life jacket graveyard next to the dump perched between two hills above the seacoast 400 Becky Thompson a German couple toots up on a scooter taking photographs while eating nine-grain toast academics from the US talking postmodern flight a film crew from Barcelona picking through jackets amid ashes and twisted plastic crows memorize the wind as two garbage trucks trudge up the road bringing old fish and more jackets I wave at the sheepherder as I walk down the hill Save the people, bury the dead, photograph the remains, repeat Here is the hotel by the beach in Petra where children would run to the iron swing set let the arc carry them then jump off dance in the sprinklers the owner emerging mumbling generations handing us apricots and bottles of water Here is the computer store where the young Greek tells me he can’t copy my poems since he sees Arabic words menacing the page Here is my patience as I sit in his smoke ask him about his family and dancing Becky Thompson 401 eye his automatic weapon perched next to a wooden door Down the highway is a new bar next to Moria. Of course. Here is barbed wire that doubles as a fence a clothesline for diapers space to toss out rotten food Here is the highway lined with pickups and two-door sedans young Greek employment guarding people in tents Here is a baby carriage a young mother pushes that seconds as a grocery cart and shade for her five-year-old a step up from before when babies were in arms toddlers walking Here is the refugee people center where they built a strong swing set men lifting weights growing rings around their arms women stretching out in a new room eyeing the Lesvos sky Here are the streets of Mytilini looking like Beirut the Greeks who ran from Turkey the Turks who kicked out Afghans the Afghans who wish they were Syrian 402 Becky Thompson Syrians joined by Congolese— teachers, holy seers, and men selling hats. The sidewalk sparkles an atlas in transit.... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Peter McGehee and the Erotics of Gay Self-RepresentationRaymond-Jean Frontain (bio)Novelist Peter McGehee was a beautiful man who—at the height of what Brad Gooch terms “the Golden Age of Promiscuity”—knew he was a beautiful man.1 Coming of age in the early 1970s when American gay men consciously set about refashioning their image, Peter’s dress was always striking, whether he was playing the slut or the dandy. Members of his close (...) circle of friends, dubbed “the Quinlan Family,” regularly twitted him for preening in the mirror, and one close friend reports that Peter could not pass a reflective surface without stopping to examine his image.2 Peter’s narcissism was further empowered by his talent as a photographer. He began taking pictures while in high school when his mother, an English teacher who advised both the school newspaper and yearbook, recruited him to serve as the staff photographer for both publications. And he continued taking photos—in particular, making self-portraits—until at least his early thirties (see Illustration 1).3 Click for larger view View full resolution1.Self-portrait by Peter McGehee. The hairstyle is identical to the one in the portrait that appears on the cover of the Stubblejumper Press edition of Beyond Happiness, suggesting that this photo was taken around 1985 when Peter was twenty-nine or thirty years old. Courtesy of the Estate of Peter McGehee.[End Page 115] Click for larger view View full resolution2.Self-portrait by Peter McGehee in mascara and woman’s top, circa 1981. Courtesy of Fiji Robinson.It should not come as a surprise that McGehee’s life and career are characterized by an ongoing and extraordinarily rich experimentation with modes of self-presentation. Peter was adept at making wacky collages that employ photographs and images culled from newspapers or magazines to serve as invitations, announcements to friends, and handbills for his performance activities. Under carefully controlled circumstances, Peter and his male friends donned female drag with Peter fashioning for himself a persona, “Princess Marie,” and signing himself as the same in letters to friends written in the royal first-person plural (see Illustration 2). When performing as the only male with two female partners in the Quinlan Sisters, a musical revue that he founded and for which he wrote the songs, he was generally identified in the program as “Marie Quinlan, the Sister with the Difference” (see Illustration 3).Peter experimented with personae even in his journals, where one might expect to find a less theatricalized self. Beginning in 1986, however, numerous entries are composed as letters that begin “Dear Winsome” (a word defined by the American Heritage College Dictionary as “charming, often in a childlike or naive way”—a manner that Peter liked to adopt), “Dear Winnie” (which is most likely a familiarization of the former), “Dear Timmy” (a name synonymous with naive wholesomeness for American baby boomers who were raised watching the television drama Lassie on Sunday evenings), and the matronly and delightfully dowdy “Dear Mrs. Hackensack.”4 Like Joe Orton, McGehee apparently even wrote letters to the local newspaper under a matronly female pseudonym in which he commented wryly on public matters that concerned him.5 [End Page 116] Click for larger view View full resolution3.Publicity photograph of Peter with Wendy Coad and Fiji Robinson as the Quinlan Sisters, circa 1982. Courtesy of Fiji Robinson.But clearly it was his fiction that offered McGehee the most satisfying opportunity for creative self-fashioning. It is the first rule of the creative writing class that a writer must write from, and of, what he knows if his writing is to have authority. But in his blurring of the line between fiction and autobiography Peter followed the lead established by Christopher Isherwood in The Berlin Stories (1935–39) and, more importantly, Christopher and His Kind (1976)—and pursued by Peter’s senior contemporaries Edmund White and Felice Picano—in which the autobiographer writes of himself in the third person in order to study himself with an almost brutal detachment, or in which the fictional protagonist is a barely disguised version of the writer’s self to the point of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Handle With CareDonna TuckerMy name is Donna Tucker, and I'm a state tested nursing assistant (STNA)! I have been an STNA for 33 years. I simply love it. It is so rewarding to me to know I make a difference in the lives of my patients. I go in to my job with a smile on my face, an upbeat attitude, open arms, broad shoulders, ears, and a caring (...) heart. I set examples to all around me. I am a mentor, I am a go-to person for my director of nursing (DON). Other STNAs come to me with problems or questions or concerns and together we take care of it. I am an expert committee member for my state's aging panel. I am a committee member for Career Nursing Assistants. I work a lot with Geni Gipson, the founder of this committee. I am a published author and the mother of one daughter and two sons. I have six grandchildren. I just wouldn't like doing anything else. I love my job and family and my teacup poodle, Baby!Let's say I have talked to friends who are not STNAs about my job. I tell them that there is always going to be someone's grandma, grandpa, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, mother, father, etc. who will one day need to be placed in a home. I tell them how good I feel when I can help them. STNAs are not going away, and the door to the home I work at will not close. In some cases it's like taking care of a child. The way you give them a bath, dress them, feed them, take care of incontinence problems. No, I agree, not everyone can do my job. I hear that from my friends a lot. So I tell them, I thank God I can do the job I have.What I do when the resident comes to our facility, I introduce myself to them and to their family. I ask the resident, "Are you spoiled?" Sometimes they say no not at all. I tell them, "Well you are in for a treat. I love to spoil and that's one of the things we do around here." If they say yes, I tell them, "Well we have our work cut our for us, because we have to spoil you even more." I usually get lots of smiles from the family and resident. After they settle for a while, and the family is alone, I ask the [End Page 153] family questions about their loved one. I like to get a story about the resident from family so I can use it in my conversation later with the resident. I assure the family their loved one will be treated exactly the way they themselves would treat them. We are not trying to replace the family. We are filling in as family while they are away from the loved one. Then after the family is gone, I keep checking in on the resident, visit for a spell and chat. I ask them if they need anything. I just want the resident to feel safe, loved, and comfortable.Demanding family members can mean different things. For example, if they come in to help feed their loved one—I had a family member tell me, "I want mother's food now so I can feed her." I tell the family the cart that is coming now is room trays and as soon as we deliver the room trays, because we want our residents to get hot meals, I will call the kitchen and get that tray for your mother ASAP. Some family members just want you to drop all you are doing to assist their loved one. When a family member asks for something we are pretty prompt to get up and take care of it. It assures them that we will not put off anything asked of us. Sometimes it's the family member's way to show their loved one, "Well, I'll take care of this" so their loved one knows they are loved by family. Some family members just feel bad... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:XY/XOLianne SimonAs a boy child I might once have thrived, but the loss of a Y chromosome in one of the first few cell divisions left me a faie half–girl struggling for life—like some changeling left in place of a human baby. My genetic mosaic of XY and XO cell lines created a fetal legacy of Turner Syndrome medical issues. Among these were delayed growth, a largely absent (...) puberty, and micrognathia—a small jaw that feminized my face. [End Page E11]At two I weighed just eighteen pounds. My parents worried they might lose their little boy, I was that frail. All I knew was I was the smallest of my peer group and had a cute pixie face. I imagined myself a high–spirited elfin princess, but was in truth shy—almost timid—and prone to tears.I first responded to the Gospel at vacation Bible school. One of the women there read me Bible stories. I didn’t understand them all, but I wanted to love Jesus and be a good girl.At nine I was the size of a 6–year–old. By then I’d started growing faster, so my mother stopped taking me to the doctors. I didn’t see one again until an emergency appendectomy in college.Fifth grade brought surprises. Jim melted my heart with his Beatles love songs and cute smile. I dreamed of being his bride. Karen was the first classmate ever shorter than me. We were best friends, but one day the principal said I should play softball with the boys instead of hopscotch with her.My parents allowed me dolls and tea sets, even an Easy–Bake oven. But wearing my sister’s clothes triggered a sad–eyed lecture—boys didn’t do such things. No dresses. No talking with my hands. No long hair. And no crushes on boys.If I prayed hard enough, if I was really good, maybe God would make me a real boy—tall and strong, fast and agile—like my older brother. Two years later, puberty cracked my high–pitched squeal of a voice and sent it sliding down to a mellower soprano. I grew taller, but didn’t get muscles or body hair, and I remained hopelessly uncoordinated. An inguinal hernia kept me from running very far.High school turned my prayers into pleas for mercy. I despaired of ever fitting in. Some Christians might not have welcomed a feminine boy, but the pastor of our Southern Baptist mission considered me one more sinner in need of the saving grace of a forgiving God. He led me to faith in Christ. As a new believer, I assumed I could be a boy for real. Maybe even find a girlfriend. Instead, the mask that allowed me to function socially crumbled, leaving me no place to hide.In the spring of 1970, I registered for the draft. Me fighting in Vietnam seemed a real possibility. Or at least spending time in prison for refusing induction. Except that a delicate intersex kid would never have passed the physical. Nearly perfect SAT scores won me a scholarship to Miami, so I left a supportive home in Illinois for a boys’ dorm in south Florida.My surname then was Klett. The worst of the guys called me Clit, or sometimes Clitoris. Others derided my small size and lack of virility. One propositioned me. Another used to pin me to my bed and lie on top of me until I quit struggling. Though he stopped each time I surrendered, my defenses lay in ruin.A few of the boys were nice. David took me for long rides on his motorcycle, with my arms wrapped tight around his waist. He treated me with gentle kindness and asked nothing in return.To escape the dorm, I studied in the library stacks, where only honors and graduate students were allowed. The next year I found a derelict building where the university stored old theatrical sets. It even had a quiet place to sit in the sun. Best of all—nobody ever went there.One day my imagination wandered through the wardrobe. What would I have worn... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Life is GoodAnnette ChacosI live in Hervey Bay. I’m a member of several social groups. I have adult children and grandchildren, and many lovely friends. I love to write. Most importantly I love The Lord Jesus Who has been my strength, bringing me through the good times, the not so good times, and the, ‘I’m throwing in the towel’ times.I was first diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1997. (...) Prior to knowing about the tumour and for some time after its removal I had little or no memory of events. The tumour was a left Frontal Meningioma (benign). For some time afterward I was partially [End Page 189] paralyzed. Now there is only some weakness on the right side of my body. Epilepsy too became part of my life. There are different types of seizures, which are rarely, if ever, amusing.Humour is very important. If you can’t laugh at the things that happen life would be a constant tale of woe. I’m very blessed. There are so many people who are much worse off than myself.My storyIn July 1997 my husband went to see if everything was okay because I wasn’t up out of bed yet. I was lying across the bed in a disheveled state. After being cleaned up I was taken to the local hospital. The duty doctor, who hadn’t even seen me, told my son that he didn’t think there was much wrong and to take me home. My sons refused and insisted that the doctor admit me. He did.I was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection. My memories of this are scattered. I learned some time later that I had had a Tonic Clonic seizure (formerly known as “grand mal” seizures which are commonly associated with epilepsy). After I came out of hospital I saw my general practitioner (GP). She sent me for an x–ray, and then to see a Neurosurgeon. An MRI was taken and there was a large tumour in my brain.My memory of this time is poor. I do recall a friend phoning and I told her I was going into hospital to have a brain tumour removed. After fifteen years she is still saying I was so matter of fact about it. I now know that my emotions, like my memory, was at a very low ebb due to the tumour. There was no caring or worrying. If there was, in the next minute, probably second, it was forgotten.Before going into hospital my late husband said to the kids “better take a photograph of your mother in case she dies.” I was told about that comment some time later. What a comfort! Then one day the photo turned up. It was so ugly I tore it up. You’ll note I said the photo was ugly!The operation took place in Canberra hospital, at the end of August. It was to be earlier but they deferred it because an emergency came in. They were going to defer it again, by which time I was mute and non–responsive. My daughter Maria arrived from Melbourne and my daughter Katrina and her husband Kevin came from America with their 3–month–old baby. My son Libe arrived from Sydney. Marcus, my youngest, lived locally, as did my daughter Tania. On hearing the operation was to be deferred again they took action informing hospital staff they were going to the local MP and the A Current Affair television show. So l had the operation—it was much easier to put me under the scalpel than battle the bureaucracy!I have only one film from that MRI. Where the others are I don’t know. According to Dr C, the tumour was very large. But to me, what does size matter—it was no longer there. Most importantly, I survived. The ten days I was in hospital are mostly forgotten. The few people I remember are like snapshots. No one moved, or so it seemed to me.In 2006, the second tumour was removed. It was discovered by the same lovely GP, who found the first one. I was... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What inspires action in Global Health?Daniel Palazuelos"Why do all of you want to go to the middle of nowhere and take care of the sickest people even though you won't have half the tools necessary to make the slightest difference?" he asks.I'm sitting in the Intensive Care Unit workroom enjoying one of those rare, calm moments during residency when this question suddenly breaks my peace. A co-resident, my friend (...) from Latin America, makes this inquiry without even looking up, as he clicks nonchalantly through some Internet pages. I look at him and try to understand him within his context; he was born and raised in [End Page E6] what is traditionally considered a "resource-poor setting," but through talent, hard work, luck and privilege he was accepted into one of the best residency programs in one of the best U.S. hospitals. Unprepared, I give some anemic responses about social responsibility and global citizenship.He looks at his screen and clicks on a couple of links. Suddenly, he turns to me and exclaims, "I get it! You guys are going because then you can put your PWAB on your CV!" I give him a blank look.He stands and goes over to the dry erase board to write: "PWAB—Picture With an African Baby."I'm amused for a moment, and then suddenly hurt. What does this mean? Is he questioning our intentions, our moral resolve? I look over to his computer and see that he's been flipping through the "Global Health Residency" pages of all the local residency programs, or the Facebook pages of colleagues who have recently returned from work abroad. My hurt morphs into incredulity—all the pages have a picture of a beaming, healthy doctor holding a beautiful, newly happy, previously sick, African baby. And then, the code bell goes off, and the admissions start. Reflection time is over.Years later, now that I have become a junior faculty member within the same residency program, I divide my year between global health projects in rural Mexico and Guatemala, the classrooms of a U.S. medical school, and the patient rooms of a teaching hospital. The number of undergraduate and medical students who approach me because they want advice about how to work in global health is staggering; their emails fill my inbox and their faces grace my office hours. External observers have even compared the unprecedented rise of this type of interest to "a veritable tsunami," and we often take for granted that this is because the field is "inspiring" (Mallampati & Heintz, 201, p. 22). We still don't know, however, what all this inspiration becomes once it touches down on-site. For many students, the experience with talented mentors on-site opens up for them a life-long career that aims to address the greatest challenges of our day. The PWAB, however, implies that for an important number of other students, global health is becoming a social capital commodity: an edu-vacation, something to make your mother proud, win a mate, maybe even just another mandatory rotation needed to spice up the application for a career in a highly competitive subspecialty.If students are the future of this field, then the way that global health educators like myself manage this issue may ultimately determine the objectives and scope of countless potential projects hoping to help the billions of people barely surviving abject poverty. I have a career in global health that is more than a hobby because of the clear vision and strong leadership of my mentors and our university (Farmer, 2011). When I was hired as faculty, they worked with me to find the right full-time equivalent (FTE) split so that I could both make a living as an attending, and also still have time to teach, think, research, and manage a project abroad pro bono. But it's from this point that my question begins: once the students are inspired, and the investment made, what inspires good, sustained, pragmatic action in global health?A big part of the answer to this question will depend on how we define global health. Global health is growing, but... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deaf InterpreterPaul HostovskyHer tiny hands, flitting, darting, happily signing as we wait for the audiologist to call her name, are a joy to behold. And it makes me want to take her by the hand and just walk right out of there, me holding her left hand, the Deaf interpreter holding her right hand, the three of us skipping through the waiting room and out the door of the (...) audiology department, away from [End Page 148] her parents who don't know how to sign—who want to "cure" her of being Deaf—away from the hospital and all the doctors with their pathological views of Deaf people.But we can't do that. We must wait here in the waiting room until her name is called. And then we'll go inside for the meeting to discuss the elective cochlear implant surgery that she has not elected to have—her parents are electing it, because, understandably, they want her to be able to hear. And yet she's Deaf. But they didn't sign up for having a Deaf child. In fact, they were probably devastated when the audiologist told them: Your child is profoundly deaf.Lower case d deaf: people who have a hearing loss. Upper case D Deaf: people who have a hearing loss and for whom sign language—and its attendant culture—represents their primary experience and allegiance; people who mostly attend Deaf schools, mostly marry other Deaf people, mostly hang out with Deaf friends and Deaf family, attend Deaf events and Deaf sporting competitions and Deaf theater and Deaf parties and barbeques and Deaf conferences and conventions, and are active in Deaf civic organizations and Deaf politics.Ninety percent of Deaf people are born to parents who hear, who, for the most part, don't know any Deaf people, don't know how to sign, and want nothing more than for their child to be "normal," to be hearing, like them. So when the audiologist tells them about the option of an invasive surgery whereby they can implant an electrode in the cochlea of the inner ear and give the child a possibility of greater access to sound, the parents jump at the chance, the hope, of somehow making their Deaf child hearing.But what about the other ten percent, the Deaf children who are born to Deaf parents? Well, that's an entirely different story: When the audiologist tells a Deaf couple that their child is profoundly deaf, those parents will often celebrate the news, smile a big knowing Deaf smile and give each other a big Deaf hug and high-five, and maybe even give the benighted audiologist a hug and a high-five too, for being the bearer of great tidings. Because healthy Deaf babies are good, the more, the better.As for the ninety percent of Deaf children who are born to hearing parents, growing up to be a happy, healthy, linguistically, and culturally Deaf adult is not something they are able to learn from their parents. It's something that takes place horizontally instead of vertically (i.e., from other Deaf people). It's not unlike the experience of gay children, trans children, or transracially adopted children (e.g., children of color with white adoptive parents) who often don't learn to embrace their identities until they reach adulthood and meet others who are like them. But if there were a way to implant gay children to make them straight, or to implant trans children to make them cis, or to implant children of color to make them white, there would rightly be a public outcry condemning the practice as unethical and immoral. And yet the vast majority of Deaf infants and Deaf children worldwide are being implanted in the name of medicine, in an attempt to make them hearing, an attempt to eradicate Deaf people for their own good because some people don't value the way they are different. And the silence is deafening.While the Deaf interpreter and I are chatting with the little Deaf girl in the waiting room and she is animatedly telling us about her favorite things, her parents are checking their... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coal for Diamonds:Syriskos' Character in Menander's EpitrepontesPaul A. IversenIn act 2 of Menander's Epitrepontes, the scene that gives the play its name, the charcoal burner Syriskos and the shepherd Daos argue over who should keep a foundling's tokens.1 Syriskos, to whom Daos had given the foundling, argues that the tokens belong with the baby, but Daos contends that since he was alone when he found the child he (...) is entitled to keep them. The traditional view of this scene is that a sharp distinction is made between the motives of Syriskos and Daos: Syriskos is genuinely concerned that the baby keep his tokens, while Daos has solely his own interests in mind. Francis G. Allinson (1930, 8) sums up the prevailing view of these two characters: "The sterling goodness of Syriscus, the charcoal-man, might convert coals into diamonds," while Daos "is the only villain in the play, as preserved."Is, however, such a saccharine view of Syriskos as an angel of benevolence justified? Only one scholar, Ernest Honigmann (1950), has suggested otherwise, but his view, it seems, has received no endorsements. 2 In this article I offer more arguments to support Honigmann's position that Syriskos was, in fact, no more altruistic than Daos, only far more clever. Let me say at the outset, however, that I do not advance this view of Syriskos' character as an absolute certainty. So long as the play is not preserved in its entirety, there will always remain room for some doubt. I do believe that what evidence remains of the play supports my [End Page 381] view, which at the same time solves some puzzling questions others have raised about certain passages in the play. This reading also implies greater irony, which makes for a far more enjoyable play. Finally, my interpretation of Syriskos as a self-interested character and the resulting greater role of Tyche in saving the child are more in keeping with Menander's characterization and practice elsewhere.Let us begin with a passage in the play that has generated very little comment. After Syriskos has been awarded the tokens by the arbitrator Smikrines, who also happens to be the grandfather of the baby, the latter exits and the two disputants are left onstage, along with Syriskos' wife and the baby. Daos says to Syriskos, "You're the knave. You'd better guard these tokens for this child.... Know full well, I will keep an eye on you all the time!"3 As Daos exits, Syriskos bids him adieu with the words, "Go to hell and get lost!"4 Then Syriskos, with tokens in hand, immediately turns to his wife and says:376 380 Woman, take these thingsand carry them inside to masterChairestratos. For now we will stay here,and tomorrow we will set out for workafter we have paid our dues. But firstcount them out for me one by one. Do you have some sort of a basket?Put them in the fold of your dress.We know from lines 407-8 that Syriskos is the servant () of Chairestratos, who is the next-door neighbor and friend of the child's real father, Charisios, so this passage makes clear that he has an arrangement with his master to turn in a portion of the proceeds he makes from [End Page 382] his work as a charcoal burner.5 What has been overlooked, except for the brief mention by Honigmann,6 is that Syriskos' words strongly suggest that Daos' suspicions are justified, because Syriskos intends to pay his dues to Chairestratos with the trinkets. These lines, therefore, warrant close analysis.The of line 376 can only be plural. On the basis of dramatic economy and staging it is extremely unlikely the word could refer to anything but the tokens, so it is the tokens that are going to be taken "inside to master Chairestratos." W. G. Arnott (1987, 24) notes in passing that refers to the tokens and suggests that the words mean to "deposit in Chairestratos' house."7 The verb however, never means to deposit: the verb for "deposit" is some form of. Here, as elsewhere, I... (shrink)

The views of parents and staff about physical and symbolic space and its effects on ethical clinical practice are reported. Researchers observed four neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) in southern England, and interviewed 40 senior staff and the parents of 80 babies. The adults' concerns include: how space affects the sharing of information and responsibility for the babies; respect and welcoming policies; access, freedom of movement and accessibility of staff; family friendly space and privacy; aesthetic values; and 'baby-led' (...) space. The paper concludes that abstract principles of respect for autonomy and attitudes towards the baby's biological and personal space take on practical embodied meanings in clinical spaces and practices. NICU design and aesthetics convey powerful ethical messages of welcome or exclusion that endorse or undermine partnerships between staff and parents. Helping premature and impaired babies to reach their space at the centre of their family involves sensitive management. (shrink)

You don't always have to learn the hard way. On the spur of the moment, the morning after the birth of one of his grandchildren, Rob Parsons wrote the baby a letter. And then Rob began to think about how he hoped he'd have the chance to talk with all his grandchildren as they grew. He imagined them coming into his study, settling into one of the two comfy armchairs in front of the fire and opening up about the (...) challenges they were facing. Perhaps it would be when they were beginning their first job, buying their first house, getting married or starting a family. Or perhaps they'd talk long into the night, when their hearts were broken or friends had betrayed them. Perhaps he would have the chance to help them rebuild the dream that somebody had trodden on. 'Come on in, take a seat - tell me what's been going on...' Rob knew he wouldn't have all the answers. But maybe he could help - just a little. (shrink)

We should react to deaf parents who choose to have a deaf child with compassion not condemnationThere has been a great deal of discussion during the past few years of the potential biotechnology offers to us to choose to have only perfect babies, and of the implications that might have, for instance for the disabled. What few people foresaw is that these same technologies could be deliberately used to ensure that children would be born with disabilities. That this is a (...) real possibility, and not merely the thought experiment of a philosopher, is brought home to us by the decision of an American lesbian couple to select a deaf sperm donor in order to maximise the chances that their children, Jehanne and Gauvin, would be deaf like them.1 Their choice has sparked controversy, not only among medical ethicists, but in the opinion pages of newspapers across the world. Ought parents be permitted to make such choices?If the parents of Jehanne and Gauvin have done anything wrong, it must consist in violating their child’s right to an open future—limiting its future potential for choice.2 But what does it mean to respect this right?From the moment a child is born, her parents are making choices for her, which will powerfully shape her future. They will decide what kind of education she will have, what religious experiences, from among what group she can select friends. Thereby, they profoundly mould the person she will be and the life she will have.When this activity is carried out within certain, ill-defined, limits, it is in no way objectionable. It is not merely a …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Still I RiseLynnell Stephani LongYears ago I would not have had the courage to write my story. I was too ashamed to tell anyone my “secret.”I was born June 11, 1963 in Chicago. I found out thirty–seven years after my birth that I was born with severe hypospadias and a bifid scrotum. Surgery was performed at birth, leaving me with a micropenis. My labia were fused to form a (...) scrotum. After a couple of days in the hospital, my parents were able to take home their baby “boy.”Throughout my childhood I had urinary tract infections because of the surgery to move my [End Page 100] urethra from the base of the penis to the tip. For years I would get a burning sensation in the middle of the penis after urination. My endocrinologist at the time concluded that I had an infection of some type, but it was never explained to me where it originated.My mother raised me with my seven siblings on the south side of Chicago. Aside from me jumping rope with the girls, playing with dolls, and sitting when I peed, I had a pretty normal childhood. From an early age, I knew I was different. I was effeminate, and was often called “faggot” by everyone in the neighborhood, including my own brothers. I always liked hanging out with girls. In fact, I believed that I was a girl until my mother, a minister, beat it out of me. Literally.At the age of nine, I was first admitted to a teaching hospital. It was there that I was treated for growth hormone deficiency, hypothyroidism, panhypopituitarism, hypoadrenalism, and hypogonadism. At age 14, while other boys in high school were beginning to become young men, my voice got higher and I started growing breasts. My endocrinologist diagnosed me with gynecomastia and started me on testosterone injections to stop the breast growth, and to help with the masculinization process. To me these changes confirmed what I believed all along: I was indeed female.I took male hormone injections for five years. My endocrinologist convinced me that I could be a “normal” male if I took male hormones; I didn’t want to be male, I wanted to be female. But no one asked me what I wanted. Besides, the testosterone was making me sick. I wouldn’t be diagnosed with PAIS (Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) until a number of years later. I still remember trips to the hospital like they happened yesterday. There were multiple IVs, MRI’s, CAT scans, and photos taken of me. I still have flashbacks of standing in front of the graph board, naked, while strangers walked in and out of the room.There was no one I could talk to about this. I was never allowed to tell my friends why I was hospitalized numerous times a year. In the black community you don’t talk about family secrets. And that’s what I was, a secret. I would go to school between the hospitalizations and pretend everything was okay. I hated my life. I hated being different. I would get teased in school, but I managed to survive it.One day on a routine office visit—I had to be around 16 at that time—my endocrinologist told me that I was infertile, and could never have kids. He didn’t offer any psychotherapy, just smiled and said “I’ll see you in three months”. I went home that afternoon and attempted suicide for the first time.I was hospitalized every summer, for weeks at a time, for testing. My endocrinologist and his parade of residents awakened me every morning in the hospital. They stood by my bed, peeking under my gown, and talking about me like I was not present. I discontinued my visits to the hospital, and all medications, at the age of twenty–four. I just wanted to be normal, but I knew I wasn’t.The next ten years of my life were full of drinking and getting high, trying to forget that I was different. I did have girlfriends in that time, and I even got married. I was convinced that a... (shrink)

Bromleigh McCleneghan and Lee Hull Moses have written a book about being not-perfect parents in a not-perfect world. The result, Hopes and Fears: Everyday Theology for New Parents and Other Tired, Anxious People, is a joyous celebration of child-rearing in which any parent no matter how perfect can share. 'I want to have a happy and healthy marriage, and I want to have happy, faithful kids,' proclaims co-author McCleneghan in the introduction to the book. 'But I reject the pervasive cultural (...) lie that a happy marriage and the faithful kids are somehow the byproducts of some rigorous and largely unattainable personal or moral perfection.' Thus, Hopes and Fears is neither a 'how-to' book nor a mere meditation. Rather, the authors seek to find the beautiful and the spiritual in the sometimes mundane activities that parents have performed since the beginning of history, while at the same time allowing beautiful and spiritual insights of the past to inform and shape the activities of modern parenting. Thus, the words of a hymn can trigger an idea about how to deal with bedtime, and an exercise in baby-naming can lead to a better understanding of a passage in Isaiah. The intertwining of the spiritual and familial in this book constantly surprises and delights: a quote from Paul Tillich can stand next to one from Tina Fey or What to Expect When You're Expecting. We are often reminded that the authors, two longtime friends, are ordinary working mothers. Fortunately, they are also experienced and well-read congregational leaders, and they bring that perspective to their reflections. Hopes and Fears is also about sharing, in the widest and deepest sense of that word. As many parents know, learning to share is one of the most difficult things for many children to acquire. McCleneghan and Moses have decided to teach by example with this book, noting: 'we're hopeful that as we share our lives—the trials and tribulations and incredible joys—other parents will feel inspired to reflect on their own experiences, and perhaps even to consider new ways in which their own faith is relevant to their identities as parents.' Hopes and Fears: Everyday Theology for New Parents and Other Tired, Anxious People is highly suitable for group study as well as individual reflection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Revisiting the Launching of the Kennedy Institute: Re-visioning the Origins of BioethicsWarren Thomas Reich (bio)Twenty-five years ago, on October 1, 1971, at a press conference held at Georgetown University, the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics, later called the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, was officially inaugurated. To revisit that event—and the Institute’s five founding collaborators who spoke at it—provides an opportunity to (...) re-vision some of the most significant intellectual, moral, cultural, and political factors that shaped both this Institute and the then-nascent field of bioethics.Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who spoke at the press conference, was intensely committed to a new sort of philanthropy that would effect socio-political change in favor the dignity and well-being of the mentally disadvantaged. As executive vice-president of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, she had already applied the Foundation’s vision and resources to the task of harnessing the best of the “biological revolution” of the 1960s to prevent developmental disorders. Prompted by the values at stake in the care of the disadvantaged, she turned the Foundation toward the creation of the Institute in 1971.Just prior to the opening of the Institute, Mrs. Shriver had produced and appeared as introducer in a highly influential film, “Who Shall Survive?”, which dealt with a “mongoloid baby” who was allowed to die in the newborn clinic because of its condition. Showcased at a highly publicized symposium involving 2000 people (Editorial 1971) and widely discussed in the press, the film helped to establish neonatal ethics as paradigmatic for the emerging field of bioethics (Bedeviling Question 1971; Rothman 1991, pp. 190–221). Undoubtedly under the influence of her involvement in the publicizing of those issues, Mrs. Shriver commented at the press conference that she hoped the Institute would re-emphasize the value of children in face of the widespread feeling that children are a burden (Kennedys 1971, p. 19).At the press conference, then president of Georgetown University, Robert J. Henle, S.J., announced the Kennedy Foundation’s grant of $1.35 million to establish the Institute. Henle was undoubtedly alert to the fact that certain issues, such as abortion and terminating the lives of infants, would be perceived [End Page 323] as highly controversial when raised at a Catholic university. Not surprisingly, reporters at the press conference raised provocative questions about how Georgetown University would reconcile Catholic moral doctrine with the Institute’s broadly-based inquiries. Henle replied tersely that the Institute “will be a ‘truly ecumenical and catholic effort,’ defining catholic in its classical meaning of universal” (Helping 1971). The reporters might have found it quite ironic that within a few years Georgetown’s ecumenical vision had provided the intellectual environment that permitted the Institute to become famous for development of the first systematic, secular (principle-based) approach to bioethics (Reich 1995).Father Henle was probably also aware that by launching the Kennedy Institute he was creating the first institute principally devoted to ethics research ever established at a university. It took a special sort of university to take this first step into bioethics research and policymaking. In 1971, ethics was regarded as belonging to religion, and religion was generally regarded as suspect academically. While it was difficult, in that atmosphere, for a nonreligious university to take such a bold step, Henle’s Georgetown University offered a promising setting that could scarcely have been found in any other university. It departed from the common mold of Catholic-college-as-indoctrination-center, yet it had an explicit and unashamed commitment to the investigation of religious and secular values in an environment of academic freedom. It was an increasingly cosmopolitan university, committed to developing the best of secular scholarship. Furthermore, Henle was willing to experiment with as-yet unproven interdisciplinary studies.Sargent Shriver—god-father of the Kennedy Institute, chairman of its first Advisory Board, and a constant dialogue partner of his friend and the Institute’s founding director, Dr. André Hellegers—was intensely interested in linking scientific progress with religious belief, unfettered moral debate, and commitment to disadvantaged humans.At the inaugural event, the new Institute was described as... (shrink)

The movement repertoire that develops in the first year of life is a language in itself and conveys desires, intentions, and emotions. This early life in motion serves as the roots of ongoing nonverbal interaction and later verbal expression – in short, this language remains a key element in communication throughout life. In their path-breaking book, gestalt therapist Ruella Frank and psychoanalyst Frances La Barre give readers the tools to see and understand the logic of this nonverbal realm. They demonstrate (...) how observations of fundamental movement interactions between babies and parents cue us to coconstructed experiences that underlie psychological development. Numerous clinical vignettes and detailed case studies show how movement observation opens the door to understanding problems that develop in infancy and also those that appear in the continuing nonverbal dimension of adult communication. Their user-friendly nonverbal lexicon – foundational movement analysis – enhances perception of emerging interactive patterns of parents and their babies, couples, and individual adults within psychotherapy. Clinicians in any setting will find this book to be a masterful application of infant research and movement theory that significantly augments clinical acumen and promotes greater understanding of the nonverbal basis of all relationships. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The TripletsManeesh BatraI am a neonatologist and for the majority of my clinical time I care for babies and their families at a large University-based referral neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in the United States. In 2003, I first visited this rural Ugandan hospital shortly after the opening of a special care baby nursery there, and have been involved with development of that program ever since.Uganda is a (...) beautiful, land-locked country in East Africa with a sordid political history. It is a developing country that is poor, mostly rural with a high fertility rate and a life expectancy of 42 years. The government spends $5 per capita per year on healthcare. The district with the hospital has a population of 500,000, the majority of which is rural. Access to health services is poor, even by Ugandan standards, and child mortality is in the higher band in the country.Most people in the region live in extended family clans. A common home is made of earth, with a grass roof, and a jerry can out front for collecting water from the well. It is an exquisitely lush landscape with fecund soil. At the hospital, there is limited electricity, lab support, medications, blood supplies, and health care workers. For the 200 bed hospital (that accommodates upwards of 400 inpatients when necessary, no one is turned away) there are four to seven Ugandan doctors, who do everything from C-sections, to colostomies, to HIV care to resuscitate babies in the NICU. For a ward of 20-80 patients there are one to two nurses, and maybe a nursing aide. Families do the majority of the care in the hospital, even in the NICU. Mum's express breast milk, perform tube feeds, wash the linens, notify staff when an IV infiltrates, and keep babies warm.Day OneAnother beautiful morning, with fresh instant coffee in hand, birds chirping and kids playing outside. It is good to be back. Over the last eight years, I've [End Page 78] made some close friends here and its good to be among them again. Every time I visit and return home, I leave a piece of me here, and bring back something new with me. This morning that feeling is overwhelming me, an incredible inspiration swells. I am not tired and I want to be busy. It is no wonder that this is where I was inspired to pursue caring for babies as my career. Over these years, it has been amazing to see the staff care for the community's babies and mums here. As an outsider, an opinioned one at that, I feel burdened at the thought of these babies dying somewhat needlessly. Is it really no-one's fault? How should one act in the face of scarcity, knowing there is a better standard to be had if only circumstances were different?I walked into the NICU to find triplets had arrived! Born at about 33 weeks they were two months early. Since they weighed around 1.5kg (about 3 lbs) each, they were at very high risk of dying —however, it was absolutely incredible to see the way they were tucked in by the skilled team. Within an hour of delivery—they were in incubators with IVs, having their hypoglycemia corrected, and two out of three were on oxygen (all of them had their O2 saturations checked). The three babies were tucked in so calmly, with the finest skill and expertise neonatal care anywhere has to offer. In stark contrast to the first admissions I witnessed years ago, the nurses now knew exactly what to do and how to do it. As a result, they had saved many lives and restored hope among the mums of the region that there was somewhere to go to get help. This success resulted in a healthy swagger among the staff because they could intervene successfully.These were spontaneous triplets to this young mum, who already had three other children. She looked tired when she walked into the NICU one hour (yes one hour) after delivering the trio, but if I hadn't known prior, there was no way to know... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some of My Mother’s ThingsLaurie Sieverts Snyder (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View (...) full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolutionSome of My Mother’s Things is an ongoing series of photographs of collections from my parents’ household. My mother, born in Danzig in 1908 and raised in Frankfurt, died in 1993 in Ithaca, New York. She was Jewish, but she never attended a synagogue or celebrated Jewish holidays. My father, born in Leipzig in 1906 and raised in Jena, died in Ithaca in 1979. He was not Jewish. In the United States, they became members of the Society of Friends.My parents emigrated to the United States in May 1938 with my two older brothers, who were no longer allowed to attend nursery school because of their half-Jewish status. My grandmother stayed behind, at her own request, and my parents made every effort to bring her to the United States. But she died in Frankfurt in December 1940. This tragedy pervaded my childhood and still haunts me as I play her music with her annotations or set the table on tablecloths that she embroidered. I also photograph her things: the bandages that she knitted and labeled, letters that she wrote, and the childhood letters she saved of her only daughter, my mother.My mother saved things: keys to every cabinet and drawer, suitcases, and doors. All her eyeglasses. She dug up the dahlias in the fall, stored them in a baby bathtub, and replanted them in the spring. She was an enthusiastic gardener. She was a violinist and her mother a pianist. The albums of music are now crumbling and brittle. Her music friends continue to use her music. The tablecloths, dozens of them, are mended and stained. I use a large square damask tablecloth as a bed sheet.I am always amazed at the things they brought with them when they emigrated by ship: furniture, rugs, books, linens, letters, toys, photographs, dishes, pots and pans. Then I remember that they could not bring money, so they brought everything else: including a box of bandages, one labeled in an early script: “a clean breast cloth from the beginning of the 19th century.” The label is sewn onto the linen cloth.After my mother’s death, I went through boxes of photographs. I found one yellow Kodak envelope, labeled in my mother’s handwriting: “Helmut’s ‘Weltreise.’” In the envelope were photographs of Daddy’s trip to America in 1937 when he was searching for a job and a place to move with his little family. He traveled by boat through Cuba, Mexico, and the Panama Canal to California and back across the United States by train. In the envelope are snapshots of my father, looking very handsome, age 31, standing at the ship’s rail with an attractive young woman. The photograph is labeled on the verso, in his handwriting, “meine kleine Freundin, Patricia Hays”—this is not my mother. My mother was in Frankfurt, waiting to hear where they would go, and during that time she lost her third baby.My mother wrote letters almost every day, and she kept a carbon copy on onionskin of each of her letters. She started writing letters as early as 1913. Most of the letters are in German. I don’t speak or write German, yet I feel compelled to store these relics of times past. When I traveled in Germany, I tried to speak German, but the words stuck in my throat.Related Articles: ImagesLaurie Sieverts Snyder Laurie Sieverts Snyder is a photographer and professor at... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:My Circumcision Decision:A Journey of Inquiry, Courage and DiscoveryLaurie EvansBefore becoming a mother, I was teaching parents to massage their babies and offering trainings for professionals. To promote my work, in 1984, I exhibited at the Whole Life Expo in New York City. When I returned to my booth after a break, I noticed someone had left a pamphlet by Edward Wallerstein, who wrote "Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy." (...) Since I am naturally curious, I read it. Disturbed, I thought of tossing it. But, how could I be teaching a nurturing technique for newborns and avoid this topic? As a Jewish woman, how would I make the decision for my own future sons? Little did I know this one piece of paper would lead me on a path of inquiry that would change my life.One of the presenters at this conference was Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, an Orthodox pediatrician. Although Dr. Mendelsohn realized some parents would allow circumcision for religious reasons, he was honest enough to dispel every medical myth and explain the harm of removing normal functioning tissue. He also described possible complications from removing the foreskin, including infection, hemorrhage, and although rare, death.To learn more, I read whatever I could find on the topic. I attended midwifery and childbirth conferences to promote my work and prepare for when I became pregnant. I decided to ask about circumcision, but the conversations were awkward and I received little helpful information. I found that circumcision was a taboo topic; few people wanted to talk about it. Why? Doctors who perform circumcisions, nurses who recommend it, and parents who consent to it do not want to face the reality of the harm they cause. Instead of facing the pain, they avoid the topic, and the procedure continues. Most men do not want to discuss or think about their own circumcisions. I learned that we need to have compassion during these conversations.A Jewish ritual ceremony (bris) is performed on the eighth day after the boy's birth, and includes circumcision and prayers. At a bris, friends and relatives are invited to observe and celebrate. It is part of my heritage. I tried to talk to my relatives about the information I had found, but everyone refused to discuss it. This avoidance made my decision very difficult. Then, for the first time, I was invited to a bris; I didn't want to attend. However, I had been at the boy's birth, so I decided to go to offer support. During the circumcision, my reaction was intense: I wanted to take the baby and run. I felt like an accomplice. I wanted to grab people by the [End Page E2] shoulders and scream, "How dare you?" I vowed I would never attend another bris, and I made the decision to write publicly instead of anonymously.I still had doubts, because I didn't know one intact adult male. What if I were to have a son, keep him intact, and he developed a complication later in life? I have learned that doctors are not taught non-invasive solutions, so most circumcisions performed after infancy are unnecessary. A Jewish doctor recommended a circumcision for a seventynine year old man who had a persistent rash that would not respond to treatment. Our organization suggested that he apply topical acidophilus. After he followed the recommendation, the rash disappeared, so he canceled the circumcision.In 1985, I became pregnant. Like many women I spoke to, I didn't want to face the circumcision decision, so I prayed for a girl. Our childbirth educator shared about male circumcision, which led to conversations with my husband. These tense interactions ended in an impasse. I wondered how this decision would impact my marriage. I experienced immense relief that my firstborn was a girl. Time was on my side.One day while walking in New York City, I serendipitously crossed paths with my childbirth educator. She was going to the United Nations to oppose female circumcision. I was in my 30s and had a master's degree in teaching. I had studied massage and anatomy. Yet, I had never heard about this tribal ritual. I had... (shrink)

For more than fifteen years, Melissa Ann Pinney has been making photographs of girls and women, from infancy to old age, to portray how feminine identity is constructed, taught, and communicated. Her work depicts not only the rites of American womanhood—a prom, a wedding, a baby shower, a tea party—but the informal passages of girlhood: combing a doll's hair, doing laundry with a mother, smoking a cigarette at a state fair. With each view, we gain a greater understanding of (...) the connections between mother and daughter, and by extension the larger world of family, friends, and society. Pinney's approach to interpreting girlhood became more complicated and complex when her daughter, Emma, was born eight years ago. Emma's childhood evoked in Pinney her own girlhood and gave her work new meaning and purpose. Ultimately, Regarding Emma shares with all of us the incremental and the ritualistic changes that take place in a woman's life over time. Her photographs are artistic and social documents that reveal the subtle and bold aspects of feminine identity—documents whose reach will extend well beyond the walls of America's leading galleries and museums into the hearts and homes of everyday Americans. "Melissa Ann Pinney is making powerful art. In matters of light, color, and composition she is flawless. But these are not simply constructions of elements. These photographs bear witness to the speed at which the little girl becomes the old woman, to the fleeting, breathless beauty of childhood, to life itself, which leaves us stunned in its wake."—Ann Patchett, from the Foreword "Melissa Ann Pinney provides a compelling portrait of American girls as they make their way from infancy to adulthood. Using her daughter's childhood as a point of departure, she traces the complex terrain of adolescence and budding femininity. The results are photographs marked by empathy and grace."—Sylvia Wolf, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City "These photographs by Melissa Ann Pinney impart a sense of the special and sacred everyday rituals we take for granted. She appreciates at once the transient nature of what she finds and its gravity. Her pictures describe so well the wonder, and beauty, and centrality of the things we know best and the people we see often."—Sandra S. Phillips, Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "Melissa Ann Pinney's record of life with her daughter, Emma, adds a new and touching chapter to our knowledge of the lives of women and girls."—Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and a staff writer for The New Yorker "Melissa Pinney's passionate, painstaking investigation of the stages of women's lives is impressive for its rigor and courage. Her themes aren't imposed on the pictures or on the women, men, and children who people them; instead, they arise from her attentive study of particularities— of the ways human lives are etched on the surfaces of faces and the positions of bodies in real spaces and places, mundane but radiant. When she turns from the lives of others to her own life, the shift is seamless but the volume swells, the emotions grow more pointed and the paradoxes more painful, joyous, and direct. This is remarkable work by an artist at the height of her powers."—Peter Bacon Hales, author of William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape. (shrink)

Megan1 is a young teenage patient who suffered a stillbirth at 28 weeks, leading to a year long police investigation dropped only after postmortem tests found that her pregnancy was lost due to natural causes. The stress of the investigation and her isolation from friends and support network following the seizure of her mobile and laptop compounded the trauma of the stillbirth, leaving her requiring emergency psychiatric care. Aisha1 is a vulnerable patient who suffered a premature delivery, having experienced similar (...) problems in earlier pregnancies. Things happened so quickly that Aisha delivered on her own at home, only then seeking medical care. She told hospital staff that earlier in her pregnancy she had considered an abortion. As a result, she found herself interviewed under police caution and was required to surrender her phone and tablet, limiting access to friend and family support just when most needed. Aisha was denied unsupervised access to her baby in the intensive care unit, needing to hand over expressed breast milk to a receptionist. These stories, which were reported in a recent meeting in Parliament,1 are sadly far from unusual. They reflect the collateral damage of a growing trend towards more enthusiastic enforcement of the archaic abortion laws of England and Wales.2–5 In such cases, women who present with miscarriage, stillbirth or a premature delivery have aroused the suspicion of health professionals, sometimes because—like Aisha—they speak honestly about having considered abortion earlier in their pregnancies. They then find themselves reported to the police, required to surrender electronic devices and sometimes advised by duty solicitors to speak to no one about events leading to their investigation, thus being denied emotional and full clinical support at a time of significant trauma. These women are not the only victims of British abortion laws: so …. (shrink)

The greatest intensity of “live” life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far as possible away. Jacques Derrida. Echographies of Television . Rainer Ganahl has made a study of studying. As part of his extensive autobiographical art practice, he documents and presents many of the ambitious educational activities he undertakes. For example, he has been videotaping hundreds of hours of solitary study that show him struggling to learn Chinese, Arabic and a host of (...) other languages. The stacked boxes of tapes are then presented like minimalist monoliths, dense archives of effort. About fifteen years ago, Ganahl began photographing the lectures that he attends. At the time, he hadn’t seen anyone else doing it, so besides his spare selection of images of the speaker and the audience, much of the time the lectures would just pass into memory, undocumented, or recorded in writing alone. Since then, he has felt the transition to digital cause a significant shift in his process. At the same time, he has seen the habit become ubiquitous as others photograph, record, and videotape the lectures all around him. In keeping with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. , can we propose each small grouping of photographs that result an isthmus stretching between two disparate bodies of mind? The first being the body of the lecture as spelled out in the title of each work – the experience of the event in all its constituent parts. The second is the body of the recipient, the listener, in this case an artist, who plays a minimal role just beyond the prescripted behavior of sitting and listening. He uses a gesture of documentation to draw a line between himself and the event, creating an artwork. Františka + Tim Gilman: As we mentioned before, the theme of the magazine for this issue is "isthmus." It seems like a very good way into your work, and it leads us to ask what connection you see between your photographs of the lecture and the lecture itself? Rainer Ganahl: The relationship is of course a concrete, pictorial one, or if you want a mimetic one but also an abstract one because the photographs carry the title of the lecture, the names of the lecturers, the site, the institution and the time of the lecture. Photos are fixed moments of time and can reproduce images displayed and reproduce visuals presented at a moment but they don’t come with time based recordings that video or sound takes are offering. What remains of a lecture is usually just the memory, some notes and all the announcements of it. In my case I end up with a visual product I declare as my artwork. It might not differ from any snapshot taken by any other student or member of the audience but I do this in a semi-systematic way with certain rules and procedures I have set up. While I am at a lecture I am mainly focusing on the lecture itself. Last night I went to one of Slavoj Žižek which demanded quite some concentration. I even was asking him a question at the end. I took photos as well but still didn’t lose track of the lecture. I didn’t walk around, I was not preoccupied by where I was sitting and what light I was having like some of the other photographing and filming people in the room who came and left, moved around and tried to capture him from this and that angle, from close and far. I just sat there and concentrated on the lecture and yet managed to take about 30 or so images of him, the public around me and of the film clips he presented. Once the lecture is over the story changes: it all becomes a question of the images, their selection, their visual qualities, their labeling and archiving. The function of the images also change: not only do they stand for an intellectual event in a row of lectures that become part of my intellectual history within many possible such histories but they also have to function as art, something not everybody else with images of lecturers demands of their images. This is my specific claim as an artist to impose them as artworks. And as with all artistic propositions the offer can be accepted or rejected. I basically spend my life trying to do exactly that: making what I declare as art, offering something to anybody interested in it as my art, an offer that is not and will never be accepted as such by all people. F+T: What are your criteria for selection, i.e. how do you choose which lectures to photograph, by lecturer, by topic, or do you photograph any and every lecture you can? RG: As everything in my life, I go by my interest which is the result of many factors. If I am aware of a lecturer, read his books or appreciate his works my interest of attending his much higher than if I am not aware of it. I usually don’t go to lecturers simply based on their subjects—something that can happen of course, if the subject, the title of the lecture is promising or at the heart of my interest. Sometimes I also wait for years to get a change to photograph certain people but I do that in a very low-level “keep your ears up” mentality and not in a systematic scanning of all channels and possibilities. I do not go into philosophy departments and photograph everybody teaching there. I go with the flow—and unfortunately a great deal of great talks I also miss because I hear too late of them. Often, I also stumble into them by traveling, by getting emails from friends and by simply being in the right spot at the right time. Somehow you could look at my lecture par cours as some kind of loose intellectual flâneurism . If you know of interesting lectures and events, please, let me know. F+T: Is your selection of images more of a production or post-production method? That is, do you take a lot of photos and select only a few images from each lecture, or do you take them very selectively? Do you have a particular methodology for the selection of images? RG: This all changed a bit with the arrival of digital photography. In the beginning I had to pay a lot of money for film developing. Hence, I was taking either one role - 36 images - or half a role - 13 images - depending on who talked and whether they projected images. With the unlimited capacity of digital imaging I easily end up between 30 and 150 images of one event still depending of whether images are presented or not. In the first years of that project when I wasn’t fully aware yet of what I was doing, I printed at least 2 images of any lecture and sometimes three or even four, a choice that was also constrained by costs. But again, since I have a web site and since images can easily be selected and presented on my web site without generating remarkable costs I have now more and more pain to reduce them to less than ten or eight images for an event. Now, before I have them printed which really is expensive, I can present them already as artwork on my web site without any immediate costs. Thus the economic factor is at the end of the chain which enables me to be more ‘generous’ and include more images. Over the last years I have been mostly selecting at least four photographs for a lecture unit but recently also as many as ten. But so far only one set above four images has been actually printed and sold. What might sound even more shocking is the likely fact that if a curator or a collector demands me to reduce the number of images due to costs, I might compromise at this current stage if the images have not been yet printed or published outside my own web site. This means that to a certain degree any selection that has only seen publication on my web site and not yet been produced runs the risk to change in numbers of images included. Needless to say, I am the last one that finally makes a decision and I do honor all given earlier decision if those were final. F+T: How do you feel the act of photographing the lecture affects your reception of the contents of the lecture? And your recollection afterwards, do you remember the lecture more having photographed it, or just having sat and listened? RG: As mentioned above, I get very little distraction from photographing since I can multitask well and do not obsess about the quality of the image: I photograph from where I am and listen with my ears and not my eyes. I am not sure whether the images serve as a mnemonic devise to the content of the lecture if there are no images involved but they at least remind me that the lecture existed, the title of the lecture and the name of the people and institutions involved. The titles of the hundreds of lectures I took during the past 15 years can also be read as an essay of theoretical life in that period. This will be come more and more visible as time passes by. These images age much better than I do. F+T: You mentioned at the outset of our discussions that you started this practice some time ago and have seen the practice of photographing lecturers become more commonplace. Why do you think that this shift has taken place? RG: The answer is very simple. Photographing is now free of any charge and hence omnipresent. You buy a phone or any other personal digital assistant and it has a camera integrated in it whether you want it or not. There is no need to develop images and there is no hassle to keep images, to distribute images, to organize images and save them. It is all virtual, not creating any costs and doesn’t require any efforts. You don’t spend twenty dollars for photo-developing anymore, you don’t need to walk anymore to your pharmacy or your photo shop to drop off and return to pick up and pay. You don’t need to go to the post office to send somebody a picture. You have a program like Photoshop already built into your camera. Photographing is now a thing for everybody—with functioning cameras made for two year olds. It is technically now nearly impossible to make bad images. The image quality is virtually guaranteed by cheap, high performing, mini-computers packed into miniscule cameras. With all these technological changes, we are undergoing now a cultural paradigm shift that includes permanent recording (not only still image taking) of everything. I wonder even whether babies are just born to be photographed—at least a process where the first photograph is right there. What is interesting now, is how the law is trying to catch up. I am experiencing and expecting more restrictions on photographing and recording—something already in place in many museums and in certain galleries—as the recording devices become more and more invisible and undetectable. It is an interesting cat and mouse play and will end up with some of us that are photographing the world around us in court. The world has become very transparent and everybody is contributing to it with social networking technologies—like twitter and Facebook—that are designed to monitor and communicate every step we make in our lives. F+T: Why did you start the practice? As a way to remember, or to capture the experience of the lecture and the environment there? RG: A couple of years earlier I started to photograph my own reading seminars as part of my art work with results that surprised me positively. I really liked these images of students and people discussing heavy non-fiction with me. The reading seminars justified this kind of pictorialism. Then in 1995 I had the chance to attend an entire seminar by Edward Said entitled “The Representation of Intellectuals at Columbia University,” which really gave me the idea to start this series. Why not also photograph these lectures I visit all the time since this really is a way of representing intellectuals? F+T: The constellation of images and the title seem like a kind of portrait, do you agree? If so, is it a portrait of the speaker, of yourself, or of the event? RG: Well, to follow up on the previous question the lectures are more than just portraits of lecturers since I include not only the speakers but also the audience, an audience that is not named or specifically highlighted as is the speaker. So if we stick with the metaphor of the portrait we would have to extend it also to the environment, the class room, the lecture hall, the arrangements of seats or benches, tables, lecture stands and other stuff typically seen on my images. Often the walls are decorated or even tagged with graffiti or posters and other stuff. There is a big difference between a small seminar room at the English Department of Columbia University, full with books and cabinets and a lecture room at a Paris or Frankfurt university that accommodates 50 to 150 people. We should, maybe, also distinguish between lectures that are one time events—mostly open to the public, free of charge or paid—and events that are weekly, closed to the public and held mostly in universities that can cost fortunes or be paid by the State as it is still predominantly the case in continental Europe. All this, of course, is not necessarily announced in the title of the lecture and is subject to information that isn’t visible on the images. To a certain degree we see also portraits of a general privilege when it comes to the public of certain institutions that are highly selective and extremely costly without forgetting that most of the lectures are dealing with theory, art, philosophy and other highbrow subjects. In general, I would say we see very little if we don’t know already what’s going on, who the lecturer, the institutions, the context are in which we subsequently can zoom into variants like sexual, racial, or age-related make-up without ignoring clothing fashions, hair styling, body mannerisms, gadgets and stuff. F+T: Do you see a relation between this body of work and your other work, for example your language studies? RG: Everything I do is “unfortunately” related. I say unfortunately because this makes my work not so easy to grasp. The relationship to the language studies is relatively clear since both are originally grounded in the domain of education and knowledge production. Nearly all my work comes across that nexus where knowledge and power are addressed. I was at one point wondering what the relationship was to some of my earlier indexical work where I was happy alone with footnotes from books painted on the walls: I came to understand that both are just different manifestations of knowledge and information. F+T: Do you foresee continuing the series indefinitely, or is there an end to it? RG: I think that I will continue this series indefinitely or to be more precise, as long as I go listen to lectures and want to learn something which brings me to your previous question: What do the reading seminars, language studies, historical research and lecture hopping have in common: I learn something. Further Reading Rainer Ganahl’s website William Kaizen. “ Vulgar Politics .” art&education . April 2009. Web. Smith, Roberta. “ Rainer Ganahl: ‘Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration .’” New York Times April 23 2010. Web. (shrink)

Professor Margaret Jo Osler of the University of Calgary, an historian of early modern science and philosophy (and a member of the Board of Directors of the Journal of the History of Philosophy since 2002) died on September 15, 2010. Born on November 27, 1942, she proudly proclaimed herself to be a "red diaper baby" and particularly delighted in telling her right-wing friends how her middle name was her parents' homage to Stalin. An energetic scholar with a vibrant and (...) positive personality, Maggie, as everyone who worked with her came to call her, never considered retirement and was actively working right up to her diagnosis with pancreatic cancer in early July, 2010.After graduating from Swarthmore College in .. (shrink)

As part of his Easter Sunday homily last year, my friend Mitch—the rector of the Episcopal church I attend—told the story of Gladys, a lifelong pillar of her Congregational church, one of only three churches within a seventy-mile radius in her area of the rural Midwest; the other two were Lutheran and Roman Catholic. One fateful Easter morning, Gladys arrived with her three children in tow, ready for Easter festivities. The homily was given by a young man who, according to (...) Gladys, was “too smart for his own good.” The elements the sermon wove together included spring, new life, and baby rabbits, but nary a word was said about Jesus or the Resurrection. That was Gladys’ last time at the Congregational church; starting the next Sunday she and her family joined forces with the Lutherans down the road, a church where, according to Gladys, “they at least knew how to get Jesus out of the tomb!”. (shrink)

What is property? Not so long ago, at least in the western legal tradition, answering this question might have been possible by adverting to a very small number of resources – perhaps as few as the...

Lewis’s original Best Systems Account of laws was not motivated much by pragmatics. But recent commentary on his general approach to laws has taken a ‘pragmatic turn’. This was initiated by Hall’s defence against the charge of ‘ratbag idealism’ which maintained that best systems accounts should be admired rather than criticised for the inherent pragmatism behind their choice of desiderata for what counts as ‘best’. Emboldened by Hall’s pragmatic turn, recent commentators have proposed the addition of pragmatically motivated desiderata to (...) complement or replace the canonical desiderata of strength and simplicity. This, they hope, will allow their revisionary BSAs to respond better to various counterexamples against the original account. While the pragmatic turn itself is well taken, here I problematise these revisionary approaches. First, there are reasonable responses to the counterexamples from within the canonical BSA. Second, while actual laws may satisfy the newly proposed desiderata, there are reasons to think these desiderata cannot be constitutive of laws. By comparison, the canonical desiderata appear to be relevant to explaining why and when the revisionary desiderata will reflect pragmatic features of the laws and better reflect the motives behind practitioners of fundamental physics. (shrink)

A familiar question in the literature on emotional responses to fiction, originally put forward by Colin Radford, is how such responses can be rational. How can we make sense of pitying Anna Karenina when we know there is no such person? In this paper I argue that contrary to the usual interpretation, the question of rationality has nothing to do with the Paradox of Fiction. Instead, the real problem is why there is a divergence in our normative assessments of emotions (...) in different contexts. I argue that explaining this divergence requires a more nuanced account of the rationality of emotion than has previously been proposed. One advantage of my proposal over alternatives is that it helps to explain one way we can learn emotionally from fiction and imagination. (shrink)