| Healing Technology: Feminist Perspectives (Women and Culture Series) |  | Creator: Kathryn Strother Ratcliff
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $47.50
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Media: Hardcover
Pages: 436
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0472093959
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.04244
EAN: 9780472093953
ASIN: 0472093959
Publication Date: October 15, 1989
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Condition: VERY GOOD CONDITION**ALL BINDINGS TIGHT & PAGES VERY CLEAN & NO MARKINGS ( LIBRARY STAMPED IN FRONT & BACK COVER PAGES & SIDE OF OUTER PAGES)BACK COVER PAGE CLIPPED OUT**NO DJ**GREAT BOOK**COVERS CLEANED BEFORE SHIPPING & SHIPPED IN BUBBLE PACK ENVELOPES **SHIPS FAST**ALL ITEMS 100% GUARARNTED
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Product Description
Provides a framework for understanding forces that produce and promote technologies that affect women's health
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THESE CHICKS ARE LEFT WING NUTS December 5, 2004
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I bought this book because I knew one of the authors years ago. To make a long story short, we clashed swords and I being in a subordinate role to hers lost --- so take what I write with grain of salt if you wish.
My rival/acquaintance's left of center nonsense however is nothing short of mainstream and commonsensical compared to another chapter written by a certifiably insane Kevorkianite by the name of Julien S. Murphy. Dr. Murphy's chapter was titled "Should Pregnancies Be Sustained in Brain-Dead Women? A Philosophical Discussion of Postmortem Pregnancy."
Her chapter would have been more aptly titled "Lets kill them because we can".
First off she insists on calling pregnant women in non-treatable commas (brain death) as "cadavers". A cadaver is a "dead body, especially one intended for dissection." The characterization didn't concern me initially even though its meaning is misused as clearly a comatose person is not completely dead clinically. I wrote it off initially as a mere academic eccentricity. However in further reading I do pick up a unmistakable contempt for the helpless adult female patient in general and for the fetus in particular. The word "cadaver" is spat like a racist uses the n-word. The opinion is emotional, political and intolerant rather than analytical in nature. Certainly it's not by any stretch of the imagination anything closely resembling a medical document. The rage is distinctly palatable with each sequencing sentence.
Read this sample of Lady Kevorkian and judge for yourself:
"But from an ethical point of view, the practice of [allowing existing fetuses to mature] suggests that its proponents do not believe that maternal brain activity ought to be a requirement for pregnancy. Eliminative views subtract or leave out one or more otherwise essential requirements of a definition. An eliminative view of pregnancy eliminates consciousness from the essential requirements for pregnancy, reducing women from "pregnant persons" to pregnant bodies". The use of [allowing existing fetuses to mature] suggests that pregnancy is a mindless act, and that what women themselves contribute themselves to their pregnancies in the third trimester is not essential to the moral community.
To imagine a dead woman's body [sic] "artificially" pregnant is to claim that a woman's connection to her pregnancy is in her aerated and intubated remains. Once again the point is not that the pregnancy is "artificial" or "unnatural" but that the cadaver is used to extort in death the female work of reproduction unfinished in life. Would we think nothing of mechanically ventilating and automating the bodies of brain dead workers for the purpose of extracting additional labor from them? "
Disturbing huh? She has the gall to bring up bio-ethics when she is a proponent of infanticide. And yet this is someone that is considered an *expert* in her field who is often favorability quoted even on this subject. Indeed this book is a text book for some women studies.
Murphy never addresses the central question of what harm is done by allowing the fetus to live to term then allowing the mother to die.
The only way Murphy's opinion would make any sense at all would be if these bodies were being impregnated while comatose and used without the woman's initial consent. But these women were pregnant to start with and presumably consented to the sex that got them pregnant. Furthermore it's safe to say that most of such females got pregnant because they and their partners chose to do so.
Murphy predictably drags up Roe vs. Wade even though it clearly has no relevance on such a situation except ironically of course in that it is Dr. Murphy herself who would inflict her choice on such women against their will. Murphy advocates death for every single child regardless of the circumstances within every woman regardless of the woman's choices made before being made comatose. It never occurs to Murphy that such a woman would want her baby to live or that what gestates within the womb is a person with a soul that has at least some rights.
I am pro-choice but "choice" clearly goes in both directions. Not every pregnant woman wants an abortion. Those wanting an abortion are the exception - not the rule even if it's unplanned. Ending a comatose woman's life before the baby is born is tantamount to state-imposed abortion like they do in red China (interestingly forced abortions are not even mentioned in the entire book according to the index so the writers seemingly don't have a problem with that choice being inflicted on women against their will).
If such a woman truly wanted an abortion than she why didn't she obtain one before the medical condition? Why does Murphy always assume the woman would wish death for her baby? Getting pregnant is not like getting cancer. Some women actually want to have a baby. No one wants cancer.
This book - particularly this chapter -- does well to illustrate the very disturbing, radical, unthinking, reactionary nature of feminism today. Feminists are much further out of the mainstream than is commonly believed and for that reason I recommend purchase of this book so that they can be confronted and these views discredited so the never become public policy. Know thy enemy! This book was written by feminists for feminists and offers insight for the outsider into their weird views.
Buy it and judge for yourself.
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