Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

While cruising through an otherwise bland and unexceptional discussion of how we in the west have tended to disregard positive economic trends in India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, and much of Africa Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution hits a reef.

Expounding on his latest New York Times opinion column he says

1. Babies are pretty cheap to feed.  In the short run, if your economy grows, and at the same time produces more infants, the adults are still better off.

Read the quote in context here.

Hmm… any unstated assumptions in that assertion? My own experience of babies was that my partner’s economic productivity was radically curtailed for approximately six months each time — three months before birth as she became less and less able to work, and three months after while feeding the baby and regenerating her body.

So yeah, assuming you’re a working Ozzie Nelson with wife Harriet and Ethel the Maid staying at home with the children then the marginal cost of one more baby is low. In much of the world — outside, say, suburban northern Virginia where Cowen lives — babies don’t come out of economic black-box vending machines, they come out of economic contributors, a.k.a. working human beings. Point being the cost of pregnancy to women isn’t limited to the cost of feeding babies.

Seriously. “Babies are pretty cheap.” Yeah, they’re cheap if and only if one artificially limits or (as with Cowen’s brand of economics) completely ignore women as economic contributors instead of domestic baby factories.

Question: if “babies are pretty cheap” why is it so many women in Africa, China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere prefer to take contraceptives when they’re available and affordable rather than not take them? By Cowen’s thesis they should be “better off” limiting pregnancy only when the cost of feeding babies exceeds the cost of the contraceptives themselves. By his thesis the cost of feeding babies should, in fact, be the only consideration when women assess whether they wish to use birth control. Right? And yet we find… nothing could be further from the truth.

Seriously! I mean, seriously!

I’m quoting the entirety of Robin Marty’s post about the surgical completion of her miscarriage at RHRealityCheck.org.

This weekend, a group of male pro-life Democrats gambled with women’s health, and women lost. By broadly writing in that insurers can chose whether or not to cover “abortion services,” pro-life amendments don’t just affect their intended victims — women seeking a way out of an unwanted or medically harmful pregnancy. They also affect another group of victims — women whose pregnancies have already ended but have not yet miscarried.

I’m one of those women, and this past Halloween I had what the hospital officially termed an “abortion.”

Hospitals and doctors in general do not have terminology to classify a difference between the termination of a live pregnancy and one in which the fetus has already died. To them, a D&C is a D&C, regardless of the state of the “conception materials” removed. Regardless of how many times I made sure to mention to the staff, either for the sake of my sanity or to spare me some sort of imagined shame, that I was ridding myself of my “dead fetus,” to them, it was all the same.

I had learned the day before that the baby I thought was nearly 12 weeks old had no heartbeat, and had actually died at 8 weeks. I was given three options: wait for a miscarriage to occur on its own, something I was told my body had no intention of doing anytime soon, take medication that would expel the fetus, passing it in my own home (classified a “chemical abortion”) or come in for a D&C to remove the fetal materials.

As much as I struggled with the sudden realization that the pregnancy was over, I also found myself trying to decide financially what I was willing to do. A chemical abortion would cost $40, but I would be alone, bleeding, and it could still be incomplete and I would require a D&C anyway, since my pregnancy was so advanced. Surgery would be quick, total, and under controlled circumstances, but would likely be our full maxed insurance amount of $1500. And of course, there was the free option of waiting for my body to finally realize I wasn’t pregnant, but after 4 weeks the risk of infection was steadily climbing, increasing my chances of future miscarriage, infertility, or even death. With a toddler at home, and still nursing hopes for extending our family some day, this was not an option.

I chose the quick and total route of the D&C, despite the costs, prioritizing my health and the health of possible future children. I was lucky, and could afford to make that choice, because currently, my insurance cannot chose to refuse to cover what the hospital as termed an abortion.

Thanks to the Stupak amendment, that can now change.

Abortion is a very broad term. The pro-life contingent would like you to think it only applies to selfish, irresponsible women, murdering babies out of fear of inconvenience. That’s a caricature they have invented to push their own agenda. Many of the women who seek out abortions are women who have been raped, who have learned that their child could not survive, have learned that giving birth could physically and permanently harm them. Or, thanks to newer and vaguer language, women who have already lost the life they were carrying, and need intervention to save their own.

I was one of the latter. I hope I will be lucky enough to never be again. But if I am, I hope the insurers don’t force me to carry that fetus until I medically harm myself, all for the sake of saying that they do not cover abortion services.

She said it here.

About 14 years ago this month my partner began to miscarry our first planned, wanted pregnancy. We discovered just how shallow “pro-life” commitment to “life” really is. You want to force someone to stay pregnant, boy, those are the folks to call. You want to do anything to actually, you know, keep a wanted “beating heart” beating they generally don’t even understand the question.

The best our chosen-in-an-emergency “pro-life” OB/Gyn could do? “Well, just go home and hope it stops.” After 24 more hours of bloody contractions she reluctantly gave my partner a vacuum extraction. The best part? As she was doing the procedure she admitted that she hadn’t done “very may of these.”

That’s “pro-life” training and the whole “pro-life” mindset for you. I’m sure even Rep. Stupak and the men (and they’re overwhelmingly men) who voted with him probably wouldn’t think that was hunky-dory. But that’s the problem: I’m pretty sure they’re not really thinking about it at all. They’re too busy “feeling good” about themselves.

Back in June, 2008, when George Bush was still president, Barack Obama was nothing but a junior in-the-minority-party Senator from Illinois who thought he could get away with challenging Hillary Clinton for the nomination, Denise Grady of The New York Times wrote

When the Golden Rule Insurance Company rejected her application for health coverage last year, Peggy Robertson was mystified.

“It made no sense,” said Ms. Robertson, 39, who lives in Centennial, Colo. “I’m in perfect health.”

She was turned down because she had given birth by Caesarean section. Having the operation once increases the odds that it will be performed again, and if she became pregnant and needed another Caesarean, Golden Rule did not want to pay for it. A letter from the company explained that if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 and had given birth two or more years before applying, she might have qualified.

Read the article here.

I admit the impression I got when I read the write-up at DailyKos was that this had all happened just a day or two ago and just around the corner. But just a little bit of Googling demonstrated it’s not actually topical at all…

...or wouldn’t be if…

...it wasn’t a perfect snapshot of the kind of jackass crap that drove the initiative for healthcare reform in the first place!

And why didn’t we hear howls from various and assorted right-wing psycho teabaggers, tenthers, and deathers with travel and sign-making expense accounts from Fox “News?” Well, you could say it was because Golden Rule is a private corporation and therefore more Infallable in Every Decision than the pope. But it could also be because Golden Rule’s founder was a major right-wing moneybags. But I digress.

The fact of the matter is that (going perhaps against common progressive wisdom) the environment private insurance operates into is aggressively stacked against it — yeah, they make money… and for that matter yeah, they can only make money by fucking sick people over — and it’s bull-whiz like telling healthy women they have to get sterilized before they can get insurance is a perfect example of why they’re not up to the task.

Golden Rule, a relatively small insurer (however pretentious its erstwhile pretentions of grandeur might have been) didn’t have the clout to negotiate efficiently with major medical centers that provide things like, oh, say, birthing centers and obstetrics surgeries. So they did what by the “logic” of the marketplace made the second-most sense: they refused to insure someone with FHPS (fecund healthy person syndrome.)

The idea behind healthcare reform, even the really watered-down versions, is in classic (Teddy) Roosevelt style, to create big enough markets for medical services to rebalance the market clout of service providers.

The reason people keep talking about a public option (and why, by the way, we need one) is that insurance-industry assholes like the little pencil-pecker at Golden Rule who cooked up the get-sterilized-first exception are still there pecking away with their pencils. A public option will help keep them in check as well. Not so much by increasing their profitability as giving people an alternative when their private insurer of choice starts making out-of-control demands.

But seriously? Get a caesarian before you get Healthcare? That might have been fine for George Bush and what was left of his party in 2008. But this is America and that kind of crap… from a pro-life private company, by the way, was and is intolerable.

Interesting post at Jezebel called Male Midwife: Women Need Childbirth Pain To “Prepare” for Demands Of Motherhood”. Anna N quotes a midwife, Dr. Denis Walsh, who says

Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby.

What. Ever. The only thing interesting about this guy is that he’s a guy in the first place. At least in American midwifery (where women midwives outnumber men by… um… I’ve never heard a male midwife named before, let alone quoted, even though I know there are a few of them) that kind of “no pain, no gain” school of thought is very common. So the only interesting thing about the original article is that they found a male one.

(Aside: Exactly WTF about everyday motherhood is so exacting or extraordinary that only the pain of unmediated labor and delivery can prepare one for it?)

Finally, as observers of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting around the world frequently note, Dr. Walsh’s affection for maternal pain and suffering is not confined to midwives.

For the record there are other, less ideological schools of thought in midwifery that strongly advance maximizing control of labor and delivery decisions (a.k.a. agency), and minimize medicalization for the convenience of caregivers, without… um… fetishizing pain, risk, and potential loss for its own sake. Loss of control is loss of control, shaming is shaming, and “shut up, this is good for you” is just as crappy regardless of the ideology of the individual or institution making the pronunciation.

But!

That’s not what I wanted to post about. Instead it’s the interesting proposition raised by Kiskilili of Zelophehad’s Daughters

Eve’s curse is famously (at least, depending on how one parses it) twofold: “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16). Eve is punished both with painful parturition and with marital subordination.

Granted, we’ve softened the language of that second mandate somewhat. But, I wonder, by what hermeneutical criterion have we rejected the first section entirely while adopting the second, even in modified form? Why do Church leaders not issue statements reminding women that God has always intended for childbirth to be painful, and therefore to avoid epidurals (or anything else that might unnecessarily ease the process)? If, on the other hand, we contend that the first statement to Eve is nothing more than a description, on what basis can we maintain that the second is meant prescriptively?

Furthermore, in comments Kiskilili adds

I’ve sometimes wondered myself why, for example, men don’t formally take upon themselves the obligation to work by the sweat of their brows. It looks very much to me as though we’re picking and choosing our commandments when it comes to this story.

The full quote from Genesis 3 (King James Version) is

 16 To the woman he said,
    “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
    with pain you will give birth to children.
    Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”

 17 To Adam he said, 
    “Because you listened to your wife 
    and ate from the tree about which I commanded you,
    ‘You must not eat of it,’
    “Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat of it
    all the days of your life.

 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.

 19 By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
    until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
    for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.” 

	

So… what’s the takeaway here?

Mine would be that even if you were a Biblical literalist… maybe especially if you were a Biblical literalist, you’d read that passage as a straight-up punishment of Adam and Eve for their specific behavior and that would be the end of the story. And literalist or not, there’s nothing there holding their descendants to different standards either of sweat or suffering depending on gender.