Category: Journals

Definition of “normal” depends on a society you live in. The society is shaped by cultural norms. But who establishes cultural norms? The obvious and incorrect (I believe so) answer is majority of people. However, my answer on who defines cultural norms is norms are defined by a group of people who manipulates society in order to increase their power and money and a small group of radical people.

So who benefits from establishing what is “normal” sex life? On top of my list are pharmaceutical companies that by medicalizing sexuality they can make medications for imaginary disease and make billions of money curing women who do not need cure. Next are doctors. As much as I respect doctors and eager to embrace modern medicine as anyone who needs help, as I grow older I become more and more skeptical of doctors work. However, neither doctors nor big companies can make money or doctors establish norms in medicine without some support from the population. Unfortunately, in the United States usually some very conservative, religious and loud minority dictates what is normal. It is admirable that voice of minority is heard. However, in case of American society minority makes life of majority hellish.

There are several problems I can identify with doctors. In the United States doctors, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies live in symbiosis and cannot survive without each other. Often doctors are doctors and businesspeople at the same time. So understanding doctors’ intentions is really hard. Another problem is harm doctors cause to the society when they in a rush of solving everything with medicine. For example, Carolyn Lewis gives an example how general physicians saw themselves as figures fit to solve problems of sexual lives of Americans by performing premarital pelvic exam to show women what to expect on wedding night. What interesting is that doctors argued that young women were confused, anxious, and ill prepared for wedding night (doctors also assumed women would be virgins). At that time doctors, using similar language, argued that women could not understand side effects of DES. Therefore in mid-twentieth century cultural norm was to see a woman as passive vagina, a mother, a hysteric, and a property that belonged to men. Women in menopause and young girl were urged to take DES to get personality or physical appearance appealing to men, and young women needed to get fiancé permission to get premarital cervical exam. So along these lines we can expect our doctors to make us to comply with modern stereotypes. But since we live in this time period, it is hard for us to identify these cultural norms.

Today over sexualized media and culture tell women how they have to look and what sexual life they have to have. With the help of plastic surgeons and medications desired look and sex life can be achieved. According to “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” in last decades labiaplasty became very popular. Unfortunately, young girls and women learn how their vulva supposed to look like from porn. According to documentary “Sexy Baby” (I saw it a year ago), one of the women in the documentary went under knife because she could not enjoy sex because she did not like how her vulva looked like and her doctor reinforced her insecurity. Therefore, because of luck of experience (arguably intense) Elizabeth Reis describes in her article “What is in your vulva?”, women grow up judging themselves based on porn that everyone with access to internet can see. Absence of visual proof of different vulvas, absence of open talk about what to expect from sex, how to enjoy, or what is a norm for individual woman separates and imprisons women in their luck of knowledge. This ignorance allows loud minorities to create dissonance that later doctors, big corporations, people with power, porno industry, and pharmaceutical companies use to make money on women and harm them. DES proved to be lethal in the long run. So Viagra for women can also turned out to be lethal.

By the way I just finished watching documentary “Let’s talk about sex” to my surprise and my delight I saw you professor in it.

Cultural beliefs about gender such as women are responsible for delivering healthy babies and women serve men’s needs played a major role in approval and use of DES. Pharmaceutical companies exploited cultural beliefs about women to transform perception of a female body. Companies targeted women from childbearing age to post menopause age that created huge market for a newly developed drug. As twentieth century progressed government and companies could not say that women’s only job was to please men out loud because women became more self-conscience. Therefore, instead companies used tactics of transforming women’s understanding of their bodies and their duties to their families.

So let us consider pregnancy and giving birth. Pregnancy and giving birth can result in miscarriages and stillbirths. However, using wartime insensitive that was a need for healthy nation and idea that science can fix everything pharmaceutical companies told women that it was their duty as women to create a healthy nation. Such situation can be paralleled with our current society where women are expected to and pressured to do everything to deliver healthy babies. In other worlds, responsibility for a healthy nation is put on women instead of emphasizing importance and a role of the government and big corporations that exploit and poison people and environment. So women were pressured to accept usage of DES to deliver healthy babies while refusal to comply with DES meant refusal to be a good mother and not to be a woman who did not want to put chemicals in her body. Therefore, the women’s primary role was and still is portrayed as being mother.

Being mother leads to the second cultural stereotype that was doing everything for family’s happiness and that stereotype targeted women before, during and after menopause. Natural process of menopause was seen as a threat to family’s happiness and especially to men’s comfort. In other words, a good mother would not cause distress to her children by complaining and making their life hard or by divorce. So children’s happiness was abused to serve men’s needs where women were pressured to use medications to prove that they were good mothers and, therefore, hiding their self for the needs of their children.

However, the most horrific cultural belief that allowed for DES approval and use was that women were not capable of understanding importance or danger of side effects of DES. More specifically, women were expected to get hysterical and irrational about usage of DES. However, companies used cultural beliefs to manipulate American society to get DES approval and make huge amounts of money on a drug they knew was dangerous. Unfortunately, DES is not the only example. Cultural beliefs are used today in the same way. Women are responsible for delivering healthy babies while corporations can be unregulated and make money on products that make impossible to deliver healthy babies, that cause cancer and infertility in both men and women, that destroy environment and threaten existence of life on Earth. Cultural beliefs about women are used to justify violence against women, pornography, restricting abortion and many other things. To summarize, people with money and power shape cultural beliefs about genders to acquire more money and more power.

In “If Men Could Menstruate,” Gloria Steinem says, “whatever a ‘superior’ group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an ‘inferior’ group has will be used to justify its plight.” The way women learn to think about their sexuality throughout their lives comes down to the way their unique development is portrayed. The processes female bodies undergo have often been seen as a problem that is a direct reflection of women’s weaknesses. The issue with seeing menstruation and menopause as a female flaw is that menstruation and menopause are not uniquely female. Many trans men and gender nonconforming individuals also have to deal with these developments, but are often excluded and erased from the dialogue. Seeing menstruation and menopause as exclusively female problems is also troubling because it turns women and girls into specimen. Every behavior, choice, and emotion a woman has must be in some way tied to her womanhood, not the power dynamic in which she exists. By reducing women to their bodily processes, men can effectively detach themselves from conversations about sexuality, relationship expectations, and even sexual health. Girls, young women, and even older women learn to feel shame about their sexuality because it has been understood as a problem, rather than something natural and normal.

There has been a movement to normalize menstruation, but it continues to be exclusionary because it is so centered on periods as a women’s issue. In doing so, it can marginalize nonbinary people who either cannot have periods or have periods, which can feel incongruent with their gender identities. On one hand, care packages for young girls to get sanitary napkins and candy that are perfectly timed with their cycles is great. Something that was once considered a curse and a source of shame has been turned into an opportunity to engage in self care and self acceptance, which is especially important for girls beginning to develop a sense of their sexuality. On the other hand, it is important to be able to separate menstruation from sexuality, because menstruation and femininity are not indefinitely intertwined. For some people, having a period can be incredibly alienating and can cause feelings of dysphoria. Furthermore, girls who have reproductive difficulties and never menstruate, either because they are transgender or because of amenorrhea can feel less feminine or less valid as women because their bodies do not do what stereotypical female bodies can do.

Along with menstruation, there is a new rite of passage: Gardasil. Human Papilloma Virus is not exclusively a women’s issue, but it has become a girl’s issue with the advent of the HPV vaccine. In an attempt to sell the vaccine, Merck advertised it as a way to prevent cervical cancer, making it an issue of “girl power.” The problem is, HPV is not contracted or spread by women alone, and although people with cervixes are at risk for developing cervical cancer if they’ve had HPV, the advertisements completely avoid the elephant in the room. The target audience is young girls and their mothers, but what about transgender boys who have not transitioned or who have cervixes? There is no guarantee that the vaccine even prevents cervical cancer because there simply isn’t enough research. How ethical is it to be proposing that 11-12 year olds who are most likely not sexually active, or even have a full understanding of how HPV is spread, get vaccinated for something that is not posing a widespread threat to public safety? At 11 or 12, this is hardly informed consent, but underneath the veil of female empowerment and autonomy, it appears to be a good choice. There simply isn’t enough information to suggest that there’s any correlation between the age of vaccination and likelihood for cervical cancer, except one thing: sex. In the transition from girlhood to womanhood, it is morally imperative to protect your health. But it still comes back to boys and men; why is it only a female moral imperative to be safe and protected from HPV? Isn’t it just as morally important to be sure you don’t catch HPV so you don’t spread it to someone who could potentially contract cervical cancer? Why is the responsibility on an 11 or 12 year-old girl to protect herself from cervical cancer? This breeds a sense of fear in heterosexual girls beginning to explore their sexualities. There is a new level of blame that will develop for girls who choose to forgo the vaccine if they later contract HPV that boys simply won’t have to face, even if they are spreading it.

This deflection of responsibility is not new and is not limited to younger people. Judith Houck’s chapter about menopause is particularly startling for a number of reasons. Menopause and womanhood as a whole were, and in many ways continue to be, pathological. Failing families and struggling sex lives can all be reduced to one common denominator: aging women. First, women are taught to be ashamed of their bodies. As young girls, they are not allowed to talk about their periods in front of or with boys. They are told that it is a curse. Then, they are taught that the main objective of sex is to procreate and that they should save their virginity for their husbands because it is special and sacred. But then, at the same time, they must also cater to their husband’s sexual desires, even if the current objective is not to get pregnant. When they are no longer useful as fetal containers, women stop having sex because, well, they were told that sex is for having babies, so if you can’t have babies anymore, why have sex, right? So if your husband cheats on you, it’s because you stopped wanting to have sex. Or maybe because you want too much sex. Or maybe because you’ve become a bad mother, and you stopped washing your hair, and painting your nails, and putting on makeup, and you’ve gained weight. The absurdity continues. Although the focus of sex in some cases is to procreate, in other cases it’s to please the husband, but in almost no case is it for a woman’s own pleasure or desire. While theoretically women should feel most comfortable having sex when they no longer have to fear getting pregnant, by that point they have been conditioned to see sex as purely mechanical and goal oriented. Sex is an obligation, another chore women are expected to perform, but not participate in. If a woman hasn’t developed this view of sex, she is surely pathological as well. By this logic, husbands and men can relinquish all responsibility in a relationship when menopause rolls around. All the blame falls on the woman, although there are plenty of justifications for the sexual and emotional changes women go through during menopause, which can be either mitigated or aggravated by the man’s level of understanding and care.

By the ways menstruation, HPV, and menopause are presented female sexuality does not exist. Sexuality, according to various dictionaries, means possession of the structural and functional traits of sex, recognition of or emphasis upon sexual matters, involvement in sexual activity, an organism’s preparedness for engaging in sexual activity. However, the ways menstruation, HPV, and menopause are represented allows to exploit women to increase profit from selling relating goods, deny women their sexuality and biology, exclude both transgendered men and women, and allow to avoid talking about sex.

Women are consumers. However, HPV, menstruation, and menopause create additional market for big corporation. Tampons, pads, cup and other ways to deal with blood flow and painkillers help a lot to get through bleeding, pain and discomfort during menstruation. However, commercials that sell those products do not accurately show or inform women about what menstruations are, how they work, how to deal with them, or what is normal and what is not. So female relatives and friends has to teach young girls about menstruation. However, such handling of situation leaves a lot of necessary information out. Also commercials are all about smiley young women who can live their lives without discomfort during their menstruation. However, as video “The Camp Gyno” satirizes modern commercials leave out that women actually bleed or how much they bleed during menstruation, the society learns that women cannot show or feel bad during menstruations and have to be always on top of their games, women depend on companies that produce pads and tampons, companies make menstruation kits to make extra money on women and hide the fact that women have menstruations. Moreover, pharmaceutical corporations use HPV as a way to sell vaccination that is not reliable safe or effective. In similar ways, “Toxic Bodies” talks about how DES was used to make money of women’s menopause. Therefore, women’s biology is used to make money.

Not only corporations make money on women’s biology they also use to manipulate women, deny them their sexuality and avoid taking about sex. When we talked about obesity, women were responsible for healthy nation. Now using HPV vaccination pharmaceutical companies, doctors and government puts pressure on women to have HPV free nation. They disguise vaccine as a way to help women to avoid cervical cancer. However, as Susan Haack noted, no one expects boys to be vaccinated with painful vaccine that may be ineffective and no one cares that vaccine may cause more harm than good to vaccinated girls. Moreover, according to “Producing and Protecting Risky Girlhood,” vaccine producers made cervical cancer that is not as wildly spread as breast cancer into number one cancer and overlook that safety can be achieved with safe sex. Therefore, HPV is used to make money and to avoid taking or requiring proper sex education. Girls learn to see themselves at risk of HPV on a regular bases not as a result of sex. And according to video “The curse” girls and young women were taught menstruation was a process leading to motherhood. While women were taught about menopause, according to “Casting an Evil Spell over Her Once Happy Family” as a disease that needs to be medicated and need to be objects that serve men’s needs.

So we end up with the situation where women’s sexuality does not exist. Instead we have menstruation, HPV and menopause that are biology that must be medically fixed (read used to make money and control) and are coined as women’s problems. In addition, in modern world where transgendered men and women do not need to hide, according to article “Why we must stop calling menstruation a women’s issue representation, menstruation (HPV and menopause as well) separate trans men from men because they still have menopause and menstruation and trans women because they do not fit the profile of women who have menstruation and menopause and can have HPV. So I think we need to talk and educate both men and women, boys and girls about menopause, menstruation and HPV (and male related disease or problems or whatever they have) so nether gender can be an easy pray used to make money and that will promote equality between men and women by teaching needs and biology of opposite gender.

I would not particularly say that birth is a women’s “issue”, as birth, to me, is a natural process. There are, however, many issues surrounding the way that society views: the process of giving birth, how and where women should do it, and the cost of giving birth (just to name a few). Reproduction and birth, which has obviously been occurring since the beginning of human existence, has somehow turned into a sort of medical phenomenon, a business, and a human act that needs to be regulated by the law. For example, Senator Mark Obenshain tried to propose a bill to make all Virginia women “be required to report all incidences of fetal demise occurring outside a physician’s supervision to the police”. This proposal shows the immense lack of knowledge of the process of reproduction in general. Not only are miscarriages common, but this desire to tie women’s reproduction to the law connects back to the idea that a women’s body is merely a vessel for a fetus.

According to one article, “Only two percent of women experienced a set of five supportive care practices that research shows benefit mothers and babies.  These practices are: labor begins on its own; the woman has the freedom to move and change positions; the woman has continuous labor support from a partner, family member, or doula; the woman does not give birth on her back; and the mother and baby are not separated after birth”. I don’t see why any of those practices are not common, as these sound like completely natural things. Why do medical professionals and researchers have to contemplate whether such simple things such as comfort, the presence of the father/spouse, and no separation after birth are beneficial to both the child and mother? To incorporate business into this, I recently saw an article online about a couple that was charged on their medical bill by the hospital for the mother holding the baby after giving birth. I cannot think of anything more ridiculous that having to pay to hold your own baby after hours of pain and labor. Perhaps, like politicians, physicians still fail to realize that birth involves two patients, but it is a natural, emotional, intense experience for both mother and child.

It appears to me that the need to control a woman’s body extends beyond abortion, but also what a woman does if she decides to keep a baby. Again, it is a natural process that is being painted as a medical situation instead of a precious experience, and it all stems from ignorance on all parts. C-sections are so commonly used that women think about it as if there’s automatically a 50-50 chance that she will give birth naturally or through c-section. I recall my sister telling me about her experience watching a c-section while she was in nursing school, and she told me that it was a surgical procedure that was more intense and invasive than she had pictured. Yet this unnatural way of giving birth has become common practice and used in unnecessary circumstances. Instead of informing women on how to take care of their bodies to avoid high-risk pregnancies, doctors medically intervene during delivery.

At the same, many women are unaware of this issue, just as many are unaware of what prenatal care is best. Why is is that women are kept in the dark about such a normal biological process? Why are women uninformed about how their chronic illnesses can affect their pregnancy and birth? Why, for the past century, have midwives been criticized for being incompetent to guide pregnancy and birth, while some doctors look(ed) at it from an objective and detached perspective, with complete disregard for the psychological and emotional implications of it? It should not be a women’s right’s “issue” because it should have never been an issue in the first place. The only concern that medical professionals and politicians should have in regards to birth is that that the child’s care is kept in mind, and that women are receiving proper prenatal care, can afford prenatal care, are informed about labor and delivery, are not taken advantage of, and that each woman’s comfort and experience of bringing forth life is as pleasant as possible.

Fortunately or unfortunately women create life and push it out of their bodies. So some people may say that birth is women’s problem and overlook men’s part in conception of a fetus. However, even if birth is a women’s problem, women constitute half of the world’s population. Therefore, overlooking half of the world’s population is unfair. Moreover, since we all come into this world through birth, may suffer from complications during our birth, or decide to have children, problems, questions, and care associated with birth cannot be overlook by neither gender. Women have to be concerned about birth because there is always a chance she will need to go through it. Men have to be concerned because they are usually constituting majority in government and make laws that concern birth, maternal and infant care, because they participate in conception.

Usually when you read history book, you read about midwives helping women to give birth. However, during last couple of centuries doctors took control over women’s reproduction. And since men were and still are majority in the government and medicine, they are the one who establish norms of birth, maternal and infant care. Nurse-midwives are rare in the American society, and doctors deliver almost all babies. Such situation looks barbaric to me since I grew up in a different culture. I was born and raised in Russia (I do not argue that Russia is better I just making a point that I had a different experience). So my grandparents, parents, my brother, me, and literally all my relatives were delivered in hospitals by nurse midwives with doctors standing by in case of emergency. However, in the United States, according to Wendy Kline practice of midwives got back starting only in seventies as a counter push to prevailing delivery of babies by C-section. It seems also crazy to me that women are sent home the next day she delivers a baby. Like wow. What does a woman suppose to do with a baby that just fell out of her? In Russia a woman and a baby spends a week in a hospital after a birth so doctors can do follow up checks on both of them. So you give birth and stay in hospital for free. Therefore, the fact that in the United States some women choose to give birth at home with non professionally trained midwives rather than go to hospital and go through C-section looks insane to me. I see the argument about not wanting to go through C-section, but at the same time not to have comfort of having a doctor in case of emergency looks scary. I really do not want to die during childbirth. However, in the United States even with prevailing C-section, according to article by Sarah Frostenson “More and more women are dying in childbirth, but only in America” in the last thirty years mortality has increased in the United States because of worsening health of American women.

I think the world and not only the United States is messed up. Like pay taxes but we will not guarantee you health insurance, maternal or infancy care, or maternity leave, but we will regulate your reproductive rights, let big corporations use you as lab rats and make money on you. Or that getting pregnant and giving birth is a natural process, but laws make it a privilege to have means to raise a child. Women can give birth naturally but lets make money of women and give everyone a C-section. Men cannot give birth but let them make all laws concerning women. However, if you try to raise such questions you perceived as alarmist that sees problems where they do not exist.

Since I never was pregnant, I do not have full expertise to judge how women feel about their fetuses. However, since I was a child, I detested an idea to have my own children. For me pregnancy and giving birth represents the end of my life where I can live for myself and fulfill my ambitions. Such a view may be wrong. However, since I do not want to ever get married and I do not have wealthy parents and I know about complications of having a child at the age of thirty-five or forty years and many other reasons (plus I cannot stand pain and I have lupus), I cannot see myself having children ever. In my view, a fetus is an alien parasite that grows in your body, sucks life out of your body, hurts your body while it gets out, destroys your body, possibly kills you and that are only physical stresses you need to get through. What about social stress? Who is going to pay for health insurance, rent, food, bills and other supplies? Where are you going to work? What work schedule you can work? When you will be able to work? Who is going to sit with your child? However, in light of reading for this week I learnt that different aspects I did not know before makes having a child scary.

Fetus rights frighten me. So should be any woman. In some state for women getting pregnant means loosing their rights to fetus. For example, according to an article “Not All Objefication Is Sexual: The Return of The Fetal Container” by Alison Reiheld, four states: Minnesota, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and South Dakota, authorities can confine women for substance abuse because women are considered as a danger to their fetuses. Indeed, medical community agrees that drugs, cigarettes, many medications, and alcohol pose danger to fetus. However, taking into consideration that substance abuse and alcoholism often go hand in hand with poverty, we need to rethink how to help women with such problems instead of taking away their freedom by confining them and by alienating them from seeking medical help. Also, as usual women who had such addictions but quit will be first to be hurt by such laws. Prioritizing fetus rights that is only a bunch of sells over rights of a woman who is already living does not makes any sense because fetus is part of a woman and not a separate being. Moreover, allowing state government to prioritize fetus right over woman’s rights gives precedent of questioning abortion.

If we give rights to fetus, we very possible will take away women’s right for abortion. Proponents of fetus rights can argue that abortion is a form of abuse like alcohol or substance abuse that harms fetus. At the same time, contraception that works for one hundred percent does not exists. So we get to a point where if a woman has sex she has to be ready to serve as an incubator for nine months with other responsibilities for many years. However, Adrianne Asch said in “Will we need to have abortion in utopia?” “the society that validates many different kinds of lives cannot insist that all women and men should find parenting rewarding.” So for American society that is obsessed on capitalism and democracy valuing any life cannot take rights from women when they reach their puberty and making them incubators.

As long as fetus stays inside a woman’s body, it has to be treated as any other woman’s organ. When a baby is born, he or she gets his or her own rights.

According to a MarketWatch article posted in January, the total outstanding student loan in the US is $1.2 trillion. About 40 million Americans hold student loans and about 70% of bachelor’s degree recipients graduate with debt. It’s tempting to come across this egg donation ad as a young female college student. It sounds like a quick, easy way to make $4,000 while contributing to a good cause. The ad not only sounds alluring, but safe. After all, ‘what’s a few eggs between friends?’ But despite the noble rhetoric used by the egg donation industry, it is fundamentally a business. As said by Debora Spar in Rene Almeling’s article: [Eggs are “donated,” and surrogate mothers offer their services to help the infertile.” Certainly the rhetoric that surrounds these transactions has nothing to do with markets or prices or profits. Quite possibly, the people who can undertake them only want to help. But neither the rhetoric nor the motive can change the underlying activity.] Within egg donation production, there are various social implications regarding gender, race, and wealth. Only the wealthy can afford to participate, and when they do, they have set expectations and requirements for donors. Infertility is of course, a devastating thing where the infertile feel like they have no control. There is a considerable amount of control when a recipient gets to decide on a donor based on her sex, gender, fertility, salary, and even “demonstration of altruism.” But in this niche, selective market, it is not just reproductive material, but visions of middle-class American femininity and masculinity, and more to the point, of motherhood and fatherhood, that are marketed and purchased. When comparing basic requirements for sperm donors and egg donors, the difference is sure to raise eyebrows. Spermbank’s list is short compared to ConceiveAbilities’:

Basic Requirements for CCB Sperm Donors- At least 5’9” tall, between 19 and 38 years old, sexual partners are exclusively female, legally allowed to work in the US, are in good health, currently attending a four-year university, or already hold a bachelors or advanced degree

Basic Requirements for Potential Egg Donations- Between 21-29 years of age, have regular monthly periods, no reproductive disorders or abnormalities, physically and emotionally healthy, BMI under 29, non-nicotine/smoker/drug user, not currently on Depo-Provera, willing to undergo medical and psychological evaluation, willing to take injectable medication, willing to commit to the process for a minimum of 6 months, willing and able to respond to communication within 24 hours from ConceiveAbilities and clinic staff, excited about the process of helping to build a family.

Unlike the process men undergo to donate sperm, the preparation and procedure involved in egg donation require a longer-term commitment- a woman’s body is hormonally altered through the process, and she undergoes surgery. This ad, as well as many other egg donation ads, are void of known risks.The ads don’t mention ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), a condition that causes the ovaries to swell and become painful in about one-fourth of women who use injectable fertility drugs. (OHSS generally goes away after a week or so, but in severe cases it can cause rapid weight gain, abdominal pain, vomiting and shortness of breath.)

Nor do they mention that the surgery to remove the eggs can sometimes lead to complications, including cramping, bleeding and infection. I was reading an article about EggBanxx, which hosts “Let’s Chill” egg freezing cocktail parties sponsored by companies such as EMD Serono and Freedom Fertility Pharmacy. The September 2014 event was held at a luxurious Manhattan hotel with the slogan “Three F’s: Fun, Fertility and Freeze.” The presenters did not discuss high failure rates or alarming gaps in safety studies, but they did pitch financing options and offered $500 and $1000 discounts through follow up emails several days later. Both donor and recipient alike are faced by perpetual media and marketing blitzes which urge women to “take control of the calendar” or to “spare an egg or two.” Risks aside, regulations and debates need to look closely at markets that produce bodily goods and the rhetoric concerning them. Questions that look at the difference in treatment of female and male donors and investigate the risks people face when distributing parts of their bodies (ex. sperm, tissues, blood, fluids, eggs) have been and must continue to be posed.

Free cheese can be found only in a mousetrap. And an advertisement from the University of Oregon student newspaper with a cheerful slogan “What’s a few eggs between friends?” offers cheese, $4000, for something almost any woman has in abundance, eggs. However, the advertisement does not say anything about hormone shots, blood work, doctors’ appointments and other many procedures or consequences of those procedures. Instead the advertisement says that the procedure would take place in “the pleasant Eugene clinic over a period of just six weeks.” However, positive rhetoric of the advertisement covers up an egg donation industry that sells a dream to infertile parents by taking advantage of young women and possibly damaging their health.

Egg donation industry buys, sells and makes money on making children. How is so? Simple, egg donation industry sells the dream to infertile parents by taking advantage of young women with financial trouble. Even though, programs that look for donors sell egg donation as an act of good will of helping infertile parents and, as Katie O’Reilly says in her article “Superdonor” and Rene Almeling says in her paper “Gender and the Value of Bodily Goods,” want candidates that want to donate eggs for some high moral reasons and not just for money. However, describing her experience, O’Reilly says that she donated eggs because she needed money. And, if you think about donation process where a woman needs to take hormone shots every day to stimulate egg production and other medications that can be potentially harmful or that retrieval of eggs is invasive process, most women without financial problem would not go through the process. I do not take into account special cases like donating an egg to an actual friend. We are discussing the process of taking possibly dangerous medications that can cause a woman infertility for the sake of some strangers who pays her for doing that. So, the whole process is not about doing something magical like helping infertile parents. Donation of eggs is about wealthy people buying young women eggs with risks of health problems for those women.

As a result, egg donation under a slogan of helping poor souls, infertile parents, to get their dreams, to get a child, abuse college student women who try to earn a degree for financially secure future. And to be more specific, the target is college student women whose parents cannot fully cover their needs. Also graduate female students are target since, for example, a salary of physics graduate student is between 20,000 and 30,000 dollars per year and an additional 4,000 or 5,000 dollars in six weeks sounds like a very good deal. Moreover, development of egg donation and egg freezing allows big companies to delay or control female reproductive age. According to the article “Why corporate promotion of egg freezing isn’t a “benefit” to all women” by Rachel Walden, companies like Apple and Facebook pay $20,000 to their female employees for freezing their eggs and postponing bearing a child. Therefore, as Walden points out Apple and Facebook and similar big companies use egg freezing technologies to avoid making accommodations for women who decide to have children and, therefore, oppress women. So egg donation development sells children, takes advantage of women who have difficulties with money (especially targeting college students), and gives a way to oppress women in male dominated professions by making women to choose between having a family or a career.

As one of a few physics students among majority of engineer students at Macaulay Honors College at the City College, sometimes my fellow Macaulay students perceive me as a detached from the mundane world person because they think physics is useless in everyday life. And I am not the only science student that faces such prejudice. The society evolved to see scientists and doctors as inhabitants of a different world where they work for a greater good of the humankind and study unimaginable things. Such cultural view has evolved from absence of communication between scientists and the rest of the society, abuse of people by scientists and detachment of scientific world from mundane world. The case of Hanrietta Lacks illustrates why such prejudice against scientists exists.

For biologist the year of birth of HeLa cells, 1951, marked the beginning of a new era where testing on human cells became possible. For Lacks family 1973 marked the beginning of a new era of horror where Henrietta’s cells were alive and used in scientific experiments. Without ability to get answers from John Hopkins hospital, Lacks were left in the darkness for another twenty-seven years. Finally Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, and son, Zakariyya, first saw their mothers cell in the laboratory of Lengauer. However, before Henrietta’s children saw her cells in 2000, Dr. McKusick postdoctoral fellow Susan Hsu contacted Henrietta’s family in 1973. Dr. McKusick needed the blood of Henrietta’s children and husband for genetic experiments that would establish genetic markers of HeLa cells. In other words, Dr. McKusick send his postdoctoral fellow Susan Hsu with heavy English accent to contact Lacks and draw their blood.

The drawing of blood from Lacks started their abuse by the scientists. Lacks understood that their blood would be used to check if they had cancer and did not know that their blood would be used for research. Furthermore, when Deborah came to John Hopkins to give more blood, she met Dr. McKusick who started explaining where Henrietta’s cells were used without giving proper scientific background and gave her signed by him textbook on genetics and a phone number for future blood draw appointments. Such treatment clearly indicates Dr. McKusick ignorance, discourtesy and negligence of people outside of his field of study and people with lack of scientific education. He treated Deborah as a test subject while not giving her and her family courtesy for helping to solve multimillion problem with HeLa contamination. In addition, years later, when Susan Hsu learned about injustice toward Lacks family and her failure to properly explain to Lacks the need for their blood, even though Hsu was sorry for injustice, she was more concerned if she could do more research on Lacks. Therefore, the belief into scientists’ cold-heartedness and detachment from human feeling has a good soil to grow from.

And yet, not all scientists have detached from human feelings. Cancer researcher at John Hopkins Christopher Lengauer invited Henrietta’s children to his laboratory to show HeLa cells. Two of Henrietta’s children, Deborah and Zakariyya, took the offer and, twenty-seven years later since they learned that their mother’s cells were alive saw HeLa cells. Moreover, Lengauer showed where cells were kept, explained what they were used for, biology of a cell, and other necessary information Deborah and Zakariyya needed to understand what HeLa cells meant for scientific community and how they worked. In contrast to previous experience with John Hopkins’ scientists, Lengauer spent time with Deborah and Zakariyya, and, using apprehensible language, he explained science they needed to understand HeLa cells. After all most people outside biology field do not have necessary background in biology to understand the textbook on genetics given to Deborah by Dr. McKusick. So scientists need to learn to communicate with general public. No excuse can justify scientists not trying to explain their work to people outside of their area of study because scientists become a general public the moment they try to understand something outside their area of study. As a conclusion, Lacks case can be used to show how should and should not scientists treat people outside of their research area.