Al Gore

the indecency of bioethics

The horrible news has just come out that Dr. Daniel Gunther, who with a colleague performed the highly controversial (and in my view completely inappropriate) hysterectomy and breast bud removal on Ashley X, has committed suicide.

We will certainly have time to mull over the many perspectives on what it has meant to the lives of all involved. But we may not do so, if we let bioethics once again be deployed in its callous "sound bite" function to stamp "Sealed" on an episode that is anything but sealed. When Arthur Caplan once again performed the role as 'go-to' spokesman for the bioethics world, his response claimed the experience as a debate between pediatric medicine and disability activists:

"You just can’t know what leads people to suicide,” said Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania bioethicist and MSNBC.com columnist.

But it’s certain that Ashley X’s case caused a seismic wave throughout pediatric medicine and the world of disability. It raised difficult and challenging questions about what’s in the best interest of children and young adolescents with disabilities. The controversy is going to continue to go on and I think that Dr. Gunther’s voice will be sorely missed.”

This comment is chilling, not only because of Caplan's insider position (salaried, one assumes) as MSNBC columnist and thus party to the press feeding frenzy, but because his disingenuous refusal to consider the role of the press, bioethicists, disability activists, and medical practitioners in the social context for Dr. Gunther's suicide casts depression (and other mental disabilities) as beyond knowledge, beyond commentary, beyond concern. "Those" suicidal people somehow aren't granted the same bioethical scrutiny as are the Ashley Xs of this world. And yet the tragedy of this awful story also belongs to Dr. Gunther and to his family if he had one as it does to Ashley X and her family.

What would happen if we actually opened up the whole question to discussion, rather than closing it down? If Arthur Caplan had asked simply, "What do we know about suicide?" rather than "You just can’t know what leads people to suicide,” we might actually have given ourselves space to consider how institutions of all kinds (press, bioethics, pediatrics, parenthood, the law) let something crucial escape their deliberative machines. And perhaps we would be able to step outside the tidy institutional structure of the dominant model of bioethics, whose procedures risk framing situations with such linear clarity that all the disturbing ambiguity escapes.

As we can see if we look at the parodic Goofus and Gallant cartoons in the latest Atrium, procedural clarity is not always the best, or even an adequate, response to the increasingly complex questions facing us as we live our liminal lives. That is why comics are so useful for bioethics. Rather than being linear and procedural, they are spatial, often ironic, even chaotic. They hold open space for multiple voices, rather than ceding all comment to the dominant voice, a bad state of things even when that voice speaks for bioethics. http://www.bioethics.northwestern.edu/atrium/atriumissue4.pdf

The new butcher

I take my chickens to Eli Reiff, in Mifflintown, who is a very savvy local poultry processor. He gives talks at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture conferences, has a mobile poultry processing station that he can bring to the small farms to process their poultry thus reducing the heat and travel stress on the birds, and he can talk a mean game about the problems with big poultry without romanticizing the difficulty of chicken farming or food production. I am sure there are many other small-scale butchers in this country, but they are a diminishing lot as the large processors stake their claims to whole areas of the country where travel is cheap and easy. In rural Pennsylvania, for example, the area around Lancaster is well served by large processors (well-served may be an inaccurate description given what happens in large processing plants, so let's just revise that as monopolized by those large processors), but the northern, more hilly tier of the state has precious few butchers. The onus on the small processor is to make his or her work known to the new crop of poultry growers as well as the existing small farmers. An example of how this is being done is below: the HomeGrown Poultry company got a mention in an article in the Boise Weekly on keeping chickens as unusual pets, and when I went to their website, I found this explanation for precisely why small poultry processors in our local area are so crucial in this new food system.
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HomeGrown Poultry prides itself on being the first state-approved poultry and rabbit processor in the state of Idaho. Poultry processed in our new 1920-square foot facility can be resold anywhere with the state of Idaho. We are pending approval from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare to resell rabbits within the state. HomeGrown Poultry has been in business since 2003, owned and operated by experienced poultry growers.

We believe growing food for yourself and your family is true food security.

We believe locally-grown food is more nutritious, saves fossil fuel, and supports local farmers. It is true homeland security.

We support local food systems - all the processes that go into producing and distributing food - whether they've developed haphazardly or with careful planning - from breeding crop seeds, to fishing, to raising cattle, to processing food, shipping, storing and selling it.

We support sustainable agriculture - growing food and fibers in a ways that don't compromise the ability of future generations to do the same.

The food supply chains we depend on have been growing longer and more complicated - and this has created new vulnerabilities. Food does not just pass from farm to market to table anymore. The links of these chains pass through more hands, more labs, more companies, more processing facilities, more countries, etc. Too much of this stretching food supply chain is out of sight, and out of public control. We either need to shorten the food supply chains by buying more locally produced food, or do a much better job of overseeing and managing them through all their twists and turns. We believe HomeGrown Poultry has an important role in this system.

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Rhetoricians could make much of this passage, because it is such a good example of how the rhetoric of terrorism is being adapted (productively, one hopes) by local foods activists. Of course, that is if you can call keeping your own chickens activism, as I think Grace Lee Boggs might well do: in a recent interview with Bill Moyers she talked about drawing her hope for the future as an activist from the upsurge of local gardens she saw being created.

Autumn in the chicken yard

I've been collecting news about chickens thanks to various RSS feeds, but now that I'm back with my own chickens, I'd rather write about what's happening right here in my chicken pen.

The White Wyandottes are much bigger than they were the last time I saw them (about two weeks ago). They also seem to be in a moult, no doubt a result of the very unseasonably hot weather. When they fluff up their feathers, which they do after dust-bathing to get the mites off, their small inside feathers drift to the ground. Yesterday one hen shook herself and a small feather fell into the water pan, where it sailed about like a fairy boat, until the same hen stopped by later for a drink and gobbled the feather right up. People are always so appalled to think that hens will eat anything, but here's an instance. (And of their cannibalistic tendency, too. . .)

The four bantam chickens have now come into maturity, and they are three lovely roosters, with black bodies and golden brown mantles and tails, and one modest golden little hen. The emotionally-tinged language just seems to fit them: the roosters are all display, the hen all inobtrusive speed as she gleans our garden. One of the roosters has started crowing--the lovely one with the black spangled feather-headdress spiking out from his red comb--and it's been so funny to listen to him try to find his particular song. At first it was just like a teenage boy whose voice was breaking, but now he has his riff down, with its distinctive quaver and semi slide down several notes toward the end. I'll see if I can listen and find a way to annotate it. The other day, he was practicing so loudly that he woke me up, about 5:30. I went outside, sure that he was in the garden shed annex to our hen-house because it sounded so loud I thought it was echoing. But no sign of him there. . . Instead, he startled me by flying out of a tree behind our garage just as I was passing beneath it. I looked up, and the other two roosters and the hen were all up there, teetering on a thin maple branch. I'm trying to get them to come into the garden shed so that once winter comes they can find water and food there, but so far they're reluctant to get anywhere near the other chickens (with their large turf-protective Barred Rock-Bantam Crossrooster). So the chicken flock stays in the hen house, to be let out in the morning & closed in at night, while the four bantams range at their pleasure across our lawn, fields, and even garden.

They do visit the chicken coop for food and water occasionally, though. I was sitting out there the other morning, communing with the chickens in my own form of meditation, when the four bantams came in to drink from the red dog bowl of fresh water I'd put down. I'd just seen The 3:10 to Yuma, and it reminded me of the scene in which Ben Wade's gang come into town. The White Wyandottes clucked and clustered, but they along with all of the rest of the 'town' chickens stayed away, while the little Bantam rooster had a dust-up first with the Big Barred Rock/Bantam, and then the tough mama Barred Rock who has seniority in the chicken-yard. After the gang of Bantams, so obviously built for speed and independence, took what they needed from the chicken yard, they cleared right out.

In fact, the chicken community reminds me of what I missed in the film: strong older women. It's not to fill a category that I want this, but because the chicken community shows so clearly that the foundation of a community requires not only male elders and legislators but fearless older women as well. I think of how our old Barred Rock hen patrols the food and water, keeping chipmunks away, and of how the elderly beared Bantam mama who has chosen to stay in the chicken yard vehemently keeps the other intruder Bantams away from food, water, even scattered vegetables that I bring in from the garden. There is a tight sense of belonging each group has, as well as a clear sense of the other's outsider status. The only thing that challenges this is, predictably, the exogamy mandate. Though of course the chickens don't know it as such--they just manifest it as the little Bantam tries to mate not with his mother in the alien foursome, but with the much larger White Wyandottes from the other cohort. However, he can't accomplish that, because she really is a good four inches taller than he. So in the end he turns to his indignant, squawking mama. (And so, of course, seniority only goes so far in the chicken-yard.)

I think these chickens are about three to four weeks shy of their slaughter date, a phrase I somehow hesitate to write here. Why: because the admission that I will kill them puts me in a camp that to many readers may make me the outsider? Not a vegetarian. Not dedicated to the life-long welfare of my hens and roosters. Not the wonderful chicken rescuer I read about in a Minnesota newspaper. . .

I'm interested in this: somehow it has felt important to me to work out a relationship with my chickens that acknowledges the fact that they're going to feed us. They've been well cared for, with affection and good food, water and roaming room, and pretty soon it'll be their time to go. I'll be taking them to Eli, the Mennonite Butcher in the next valley who does the butchering for all of the small farmers in the area. He's careful, gentle, quick, and the most interesting talker I've come across in a long time. When I first met him I decided that he was actually a life form in need of protection, since the small-scale butchers have pretty well vanished from central Pennsylvania. I stand with the chickens as he butchers them, having brought them to him following his careful instructions: no stress, crates covered with a blanket if the air is cold or the wind is harsh. But I'm still wondering how I'll feel after knowing these birds since May 31: we've planned on them as our dinner for the winter & spring, but I'm sorely tempted to keep at least one hen out, as a layer and friend. There's the curious one with the dark red comb and wattles . . .

Mortality: my chickens face it as my friends are facing it, and my mother (who's just fallen, and is increasingly frail), and I all face it. Autumn brings it all right out in the open: the warm, soft, mellow approach to the killing frost.