Thursday, July 1, 2010

When "Science" Has an Agenda

So Angry.

A Florida doctor is dosing pregnant women with an experimental (and non-FDA approved) hormone to prevent their daughters from becoming lesbians and--BONUS!--make sure they grow up into wives and mothers. You know, proper ladies who want to cook and clean and wait for their man to bring home the bacon. Because being a wife and a mother is the ultimate goal of every woman in the world. If you chose NOT to be a wife or mother, there is obviously something wrong with you. Also, lesbianism is bad. So we can blame childless lesbian spinsters on their parents because mom obviously didn't love her child enough to dose herself up with Dex in utero. And you know what else is bad? Not adhering to a gender binary.

On the heels of the fuckery that is the doctor who is shortening CAH people's clits and then stimulating them with a vibrator to make sure they still work comes this, which is also an attempt to prevent ambiguous genitalia in children with CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia which is a condition that lowers the tolerance to estrogen and results in a 'masculinizing' of the genitals). So this doctor wants to do her patients a solid and make sure all female babies grow up to be appropriately 'girly' and well as making sure kids with CAH are "girly" outside and in. We're just going to ignore the fact that masculinity and femininity are both culturally dictated binaries and that people are different, not to mention what qualifies as a masculine or feminine activity changes. Like in the 1800s when a man proved his masculinity by decorating a house. My favorite comment:
"It is enormously frustrating when scientists treat natural variation as a problem to be solved, and necessarily deny humans' capacity for ideological adaptation in order to sustain that pretense."
Read More...

This is all such bullshit science, and not just because Dex isn't FDA approved.
“The challenge here is... to see what could be done to restore this baby to the normal female appearance which would be compatible with her parents presenting her as a girl, with her eventually becoming somebody’s wife, and having normal sexual development, and becoming a mother. And she has all the machinery for motherhood, and therefore nothing should stop that, if we can repair her surgically and help her psychologically to continue to grow and develop as a girl.”

Naturally, we're just assuming that the child in questions wants to be a girl or even wants a binary gender at all. We also seem to be avoiding the term 'intersex' in the articles I've read so far, which is a lovely way to continue making an invisible group of people more invisible. Props, media outlets.

...the 2008 paper by Meyer-Bahlburg et al hints that variation in sexual orientation beyond the population of girls with CAH might also be partly explainable through prenatal androgen exposure. Such reasoning could lead to the pursuit of other “screening” and “treatment” methods for manipulating intrauterine environments.

While everyone has been busy watching geneticists at the frontier of the brave new world, none of us seem to have noticed what some pediatricians are up to. Perhaps it is because so many people are fascinated by the idea of a “gay gene” that prenatal “lesbian hormones” have slipped past public scrutiny. In any case, we think Nimkarn and New’s “paradigm for prenatal diagnosis and treatment” suggests a reason why activists for gay and lesbian rights should be wary of believing that claims for the innateness of homosexuality will lead to liberation. (BioEthics Forum)

I think this has been done before. Experimenting on minorities/"undesirables" and then extrapolating out to the wider population.

The Readings:
  • The Announcement

  • What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia? by H. F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg [the paper]

    “CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”

  • Doctor Treating Pregnant Women With Experimental Drug To Prevent Lesbianism [Slog]

  • Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb? [Bioethics Forum]

  • Pregnant Women Being Given Experimental Drug to Breed Girly Girls [Strollerderby]

  • Awful Doc Drugs Pregnant Women To Make Their Babies More Girly [Jezebel]

  • A Prenatal Treatment Raises Questions of Medical Ethics [Time]

  • Clinical Practice Guideline on CAH Approved by the Society [Endo-Society]

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You provide a very sophomoric argument here.

How about this

"The medical ethics problems (to say nothing of the potential health risks) surrounding the use of prenatal dexamethasone are not trivial, obviously. Dr. Maria New, the endocrinologist and researcher cited as an early champion of prenatal dex in the Time article, appears to be a controversial figure—for starters, she classifies a number of "male" characteristics as "abnormal" in women. This is brought to light at the Bioethics Forum at the Hastings Center, where they concur with pretty much the rest of the world that use of these drugs should take place in supervised clinical trials.

That seems fair. But it’s not fair to suggest that parents who are worried about the possible complications and problems their child might face as the result of being born with ambiguous genitalia, and who are offered a medical intervention that might help, are simply trying to avoid having a lesbian daughter. It’s very misleading of these two writers, both of whom I have a very high regard for, to position the story in this way.

Here’s my question for Messrs. Savage and Byrne. If we believe in the absolute sovereignty of a woman’s body, of her right to choose, then are we also bound to support her right to treat the fetus she is carrying with whatever medications or therapies are agreed on by her and her doctor?"

http://www.theawl.com/2010/07/doctors-really-not-testing-drug-on-pregnant-women-so-as-to-prevent-lesbianism

Al said...

As you obviously didn't even read the material, particularly the part where she wants to use Dex on non-CAH children to make sure they fit whatever twisted notion of 'girly' the doctor has, I'm not going to waste my time on this.

Anonymous said...

Did you read the article I linked to? It's balanced, unhysterical. Not link bait crapola

How about

"This treatment, prenatal dexamethasone, isn’t being given to anyone at all in order to prevent lesbianism.

It’s being given to prevent the most extreme effects of congenital adrenal hyperplasia, notably the formation of ambiguous genitalia (photo NSFW) in potential victims of CAH, a rare genetic disorder that floods the developing fetus with androgens. Prenatal dex is not being given to just any pregnant women, only to those who are carriers of CAH—and certainly not because they fear having lesbian daughters.

What does “ambiguous genitalia” mean, exactly? A pregnant woman who is a carrier of CAH has a chance of her female baby being born with the following:

* An enlarged clitoris that has the appearance of a small penis.

* The urethral opening (where urine comes out) can be anywhere along, above, or below the surface of the clitoris.

* The labia may be fused, resembling a scrotum.

* The infant may be thought to be a male with undescended testicles.

* Sometimes a lump of tissue is felt within the fused labia, further making it look like a scrotum with testicles.

Time also reported on the effects of CAH on genital development:

Because the condition causes overproduction of male hormones in the womb, girls who are affected tend to have genitals that look more male than female, though internal sex organs are normal. (In boys, in contrast, the condition leads to early signs of puberty, such as deep voice, body hair and enlarged penis by age 2 or 3.)"

Al said...

Why are you sending me the effects of CAH?

I never suggested that parents who worry about doing the right thing for their kids are wrong. Every parent worries about that every day. And again, not going to get in an in-depth intersex discussion with you, though I will say I am against doing anything cosmetic to a child until they are of age to make their own decisions about who they are and who they want to be. This paper, these findings, and the nature of these studies are inherently biased. In addition to hte quotes above which outline the doctor's opinion of what makes a proper girl:

"...the 2008 paper by Meyer-Bahlburg et al hints that variation in sexual orientation beyond the population of girls with CAH might also be partly explainable through prenatal androgen exposure. Such reasoning could lead to the pursuit of other “screening” and “treatment” methods for manipulating intrauterine environments.

While everyone has been busy watching geneticists at the frontier of the brave new world, none of us seem to have noticed what some pediatricians are up to. Perhaps it is because so many people are fascinated by the idea of a “gay gene” that prenatal “lesbian hormones” have slipped past public scrutiny. In any case, we think Nimkarn and New’s “paradigm for prenatal diagnosis and treatment” suggests a reason why activists for gay and lesbian rights should be wary of believing that claims for the innateness of homosexuality will lead to liberation."

BioEthics Forum http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=4754&blogid=140