One of the daily feeds to which I subscribe is “Stat News.” https://www.statnews.com “Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine.” It’s mostly for doctors, but not too technical to follow. Always interesting, sometimes surprising, occasionally shocking.
I’ve been watching for examples I could use to talk about the difference between approaching a subject or category through two different assumptions, drawing boundaries and considering everything inside that line, and the other one being starting from a center point and radiating out through the surrounding issues as far as could be followed. This is a deep change in methods of processing ideas. Most people don’t even realize they are using any “method.” They think they’re just “thinking.”
The first case from STAT starts with a bittersweet story about conjoined twins, who had to be separated in order to save one of them. Otherwise both would die. This was beautifully explored by the author in terms of communities: the parents, of course; the teams of surgeons and experts who conferred about what to do; and the religious advisors of the family. It radiates out from two tiny girls into the larger world of human dilemmas.
The story is not just factual, but includes the emotions of those who participated and observed this dilemma and its resolution, which was successful in a sense, since the surviving baby is healthy and happy. The kicker at the end of the story is that the mother is pregnant again — this is taken as “happy,” but what if the factors that underlie the incomplete separation of the first conception are still in play? Another question is about why the conjoined twins were not detected and aborted before birth. But these are not addressed, nor are the larger research issues.
The second story only seems similar on the surface because it’s about problematic births, this time “preemies,” babies born too soon and therefore incomplete. This is a group with a defined boundary. Of course, all human babies are born before they are complete because they must be small enough to get through the bone pelvis of an adult woman. But the babies included in this study are inside the average gestation period of most babies, 280 days. At present — with technology — babies can complete gestation in “isolettes” with tightly controlled support. 21 weeks and a few days is the earliest surviving baby recorded. Before 24 weeks some doctors will refuse the effort to keep the infant alive. 24 weeks is the “boundary.”
In the first place, Mother Nature will try to end a pregnancy if something has gone wrong, either with the baby or the mother. In the second place, the struggle to survive under incomplete circumstances, like being outside the womb, can create additional malfunctions and limitations. Many of the “Miracle Babies” that are celebrated as defeats against evil forces through the magic of modern medicine, are incomplete triumphs. The babies may have deficits and handicaps that require lifelong support and impose cruel limits.
But the article is about what I’m learning to call “data shadows,” the accumulation of statistics, often expressed as bell curves. There are two "kinds" of these shadows, which I first learned about in the ground-breaking study called “A Billion Wicked Thoughts.” The authors, Ogas and Gaddam, chose the sensational topic of online pornography, which they defined by consulting porn providers. It is research into a secret subject, especially when people think they are shielded by the “anonymous” internet. The authors would never have been able to guess what some of the categories were, like “school girls with penises.” That’s where I first read about “tentacle porn.”
They did not look at the data “shadow” or footprint of any individual’s “hits,” but they could have. Instead they simply tried to understand the aggregated group shadows, which the media providers try to assure us are the only thing that will be disclosed. All this is suddenly relevant politically. In the case of the last election, “hits” can be as granular as url’s in order to target like-minded people in specific voting districts. If people would give up prudery enough to consider “wickedness,” they would understand the risks on the internet a lot better. Taboos enforce illicit boundaries.
So in this STAT article about a group, the idea was to look at the aggregated data about babies born before 280 days. They could tell whether the numbers were going up or down and they could group them by various criteria, in this case race, which has very blurry boundaries. Still, they came up with statistics comparing the rate of premature births among whites, African-Americans, and “American Indians”. All these groups are internally and rather radically assorted. The true boundary was women who conceived and did not abort.
Some would try to use this data to say that some races can’t complete pregnancies, because politicians want malicious evidence to prove stigma. But this article proposes that stigmatized mothers are likely to be economically challenged, to not get as good care, to not eat well, and so on. The true cause is not skin color or place of residence, but the limitations put on the mothers because of their “category.” Government support to improve these factors can prevent premature births. (The stats in the USA are bad.)
Because premature babies, even the ones who are relatively late, will require expensive and skillful care, maybe for a long time, and because we at least pretend to give medical care to babies no matter how poor or dark they may be, it is simply practical to invest in healthy mothers. Strangely, politically conservative forces will refuse programs that do this. They will refuse money for the care of premature infants. They will refuse abortions. And once even healthy babies are outside of their mothers, conservatives lose interest unless they can have the babies.
This article gave no attention to the deaths of mothers. “In 2015, an estimated 303 000 women will die from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth. In addition, for every woman who dies in childbirth, dozens more suffer injury, infection or disease.” Googling distracts by putting abortion as the most common cause at the head of most lists. Abortion is as much cultural as medical. Boundary categories, like voting districts, can be gerrymandered.
Human births are highly emotional and full of trauma and taboos, but they are still simply biological and inevitable if the basic conditions are met, or we wouldn’t be a species in existence anymore. Babies are a process that unfolds, as well as individual beings who might have souls. It’s hard to imagine a more “embodied thought” subject than the production of new bodies out of female bodies. I think of kittens sometimes in order to evade the cultural entanglements. Even with the kittens in my household, I can barely understand that the little pin dot of tissue in the mother cat will 64 days later be an inches-long mewling, squirming newborn.
*One week-old domestic cats may crawl as much as a few feet at a time, usually to rejoin siblings in the perpetual huddle for warmth.
*Most cats can stand at around 3 weeks of age.
*When they start to eat solids, the mother stops consuming their bodily waste and the kittens begin to bury their excretions in the ground or litter box.
*At about 4 weeks of age, kittens begin to walk. Their tails become upright.
*The kittens start to run, jump and climb with frenetic intensity.
*By 6 or 7 weeks of age, domestic kittens usually are fully weaned and eating only solid foods.
*At 8 weeks of age, many are taken from the litter to new homes, but 12 weeks is a better time for this separation -- the extra time spent with the feline family is important for social development, as long as there is also interaction with humans.
TOTAL: 4 months from nonexistence to a creature with a developing personality, approaching food, running from danger (tails straight up), competing with the other kittens.
Humans take much longer. The true age of brain maturation, marked by the migration of conscious thought from the more general cortex and underlying functions to a true pre-frontal cortex ability, is 25. If this were the age parents had to be, there would be a major outcry. In some circumstances people don’t live that long. I haven’t seen a study of those deaths yet.
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