Taking charge of my what now?
This natural fertility stuff is all right, but I miss having a shorter, less brutal period and no three-day crying jags beforehand.
Don’t miss the migraines and expelling huge blood clots, though.
A curious comparison
Since August, I’ve worked on Sunday afternoons. I really like this job and value the experience, but it keeps me from attending my favored masses at 11:00 or 12:00 (different parishes and different cities.) Now that it’s summer, my job is over, so I’m enjoying my last day of getting paid to sit and read the Sunday New York Times.
Poking through the Times today, I noticed articles in two different sections of the paper that fit together beautifully, even if the editors might not admit that they did.
First, “Modern Love: My First Lesson in Motherhood” tells the story of a couple who adopted a baby girl in China, discovered some potentially serious health problems, and were offered the opportunity to, to put it crudely, exchange her for a healthier baby. In the end, they made the decision to keep her, and further tests back in the US showed that her health problems were not as serious as they had initially feared. The author concludes:
It’s tempting to think that our decision was validated by the fact that everything turned out O.K. But for me that’s not the point. Our decision was right because she was our daughter and we loved her. We would not have chosen the burdens we anticipated, and in fact we declared upfront our inability to handle such burdens. But we are stronger than we thought.
“Genetic Testing + Abortion = ??” is the same issue in different words. It discusses the problems when two core liberal values–reproductive choice and acceptance of diversity–clash in one genetic test. The only difference is that before making the decision whether a disabled fetus has a right to live, the prospective parents do not have a chance to see its face, hear it laugh, or cuddle it. Instead of denying a child a chance to live in the United States or with their particular family, children with “unfavorable” genetic profiles will likely be denied the opportunity to live at all.
Abortion rights supporters — who believe that a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body — have had to grapple with the reality that the right to choose may well be used selectively to abort fetuses deemed genetically undesirable. And many are finding that, while they support a woman’s right to have an abortion if she does not want to have a baby, they are less comfortable when abortion is used by women who don’t want to have a particular baby.
Even before my return to Catholicism, abortion made me uneasy, since I hated the idea that the fate of a healthy child hinged on whether or not it was wanted. Two more or less identical fetuses would be a much-wanted “baby” to one woman, and an inconvenient parasite to another. It creates so many ethical lines that are hard to draw. When one supports abortion, what’s the difference, if any, between an unwanted healthy child and a wanted child with an unwanted serious disability? How about gender selection? What happens when people who can’t afford genetic testing have proportionately more children who require expensive health care?
If I had definitive answers to these questions, I’d be in a very different line of work.
DSM-II 302.0
I moved to this city twenty-five months ago, but I still haven’t managed to find myself a psychiatrist. I have been treated for depression and dysthymia for a half-dozen years now, and lacking first comprehensive, then any health insurance, whatever traditional psychotherapy I sought would have to be paid for out of pocket. As a full-time student and part-time library paraprofessional, there’s not much in my pockets, so I have to make do with what resources I can cobble together.
I saw a resident at the medical school for a while, and consulted with my former psychiatrist over the phone while I was in transition from one place to another. Phone consultations are hard, and at the sliding-scale clinic I had serious doubts about the competence of my resident, as well as disgust at the unprofessional behavior of the reception staff. I found a combination of medications that keeps me relatively stable and content, and I have a GP prescribing them to me as a stopgap situation until I can set myself up with a competent specialist who is willing to see a patient who pays out-of-pocket.
That’s a gloss of my background info. One of these weeks I’ll write more about mental illness, despair, and lack of faith.
Someone on a message board mentioned catholictherapists.com, which piqued my interest–it might be nice for once to see a mental health professional who doesn’t see my geriatric (past age 20) virginity as a serious crisis to be remedied as soon as possible. There was one listed in my city, whose office I drive past every day on my way to work. Looking over her profile, I saw something that stuck in the back of my mind. The site asks applicants to state and comment on which official Church teachings they agree or disagree with. Catholic personals sites do the same thing, of course–all for reasons that should be self-evident. You can see the application here: it asks about artificial contraception, abortion, infertility, cohabitation…the everyday issues that most mainstream American Catholics ignore.
The local shrink agreed with the last item. The Church’s teaching on homosexuality.
Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
This is a valid teaching, even if it’s one that I disagree with, and I understand why they include it…but then, I don’t. I understand that there are still conservative physicians and therapists who believe that homosexuality is a psychiatric illness in need of treatment or who call for chastity and conquering one’s urges. Fine. To say that being homosexual is “disordered” implies that it is a mental illness…which it hasn’t been considered such by her profession since 1972.
Pharmacists and hospitals have a right not to stock or dispense Plan B. Here in New York, you can have a special testing time for civil service exams if they happen to fall on a religious holiday or day of rest. I oppose on ethical grounds the policy of my profession (librarian) that all patrons, even minors, should have access to all materials in the library.
It’s one thing to gracefully bow out of doing things at work that one’s religion forbids, but publicly declaring disagreement with the profession’s definition of what constitutes a mental illness? I can see the reasoning behind it, but I’m not sure I would want to be a patient of a doctor who clicked the little ticky box in complete sincerity.
