Health Care/Joan Retsinas

From Genetics to the Media: In Praise of Sunshine

Justice Louis Brandeis called sunlight the best disinfectant, electric light the most efficient policeman. That light ultimately depends upon “the media” with its internet-driven arms.

This tale begins with a genetics test - one of those touted on television. A person dances an Irish jig, until the swab of saliva shows that s/he should be dancing a tango. The percentages reel forth: so much Italian, so much German, so much Egyptian. For most people, the DNA test yields fun factoids; for some, it yields half-siblings and questionable paternity. In rare instances it unearths cruel lies.

One woman and her birth mother recently found each other via a genetics test. Almost 70 years ago, (Christina Caron reported in the New York Times, Dec. 10, 2018), an 18-year-old pregnant girl arrived at a hospital to give birth. She signed the forms she was given, without demanding an explanation. When the hospital official told her that the baby girl did not live, the mother accepted the news. She did not ask to see the deceased baby: she had no reason to distrust the hospital. Because of a later hysterectomy, she had no subsequent children. The newborn did not die. Instead, the hospital gave her to a couple who adopted her. The couple told her she was adopted, that they picked her from the hospital. They did not say her mother was alive, wanted her. Maybe they didn’t know.

The miracle of widespread genetic testing united mother and daughter. At this point the Hallmark ending is bittersweet, with years lost, but years left, though not many, since the birth mother is 89 years old.

The media shed a spotlight on those not-so-long ago years when a young unmarried pregnant girl risked a big “I” for Immoral on her chest, or “A” for adulterer, since often the father-who-would-not wed was already married. Seventy years of records have faded into archival dust. But we know that she gave birth in a Catholic hospital in the Midwest.

Presumably, the hospital’s decision to lie to the mother was kind. Presumably, the hospital decided that the child would fare better with a married two-couple (in that era, obviously heterosexual)) household, the mother with a fresh start, unencumbered with a newborn. All well-meaning. All shrouded in official documents. Presumably, no money changed hands, as in mid-20th-century Ireland, where the novel Philomena, followed by the movie, shed light on the official decision to whisk babies from their unwed mothers, in effect selling them to adoptive parents.

Seventy years ago no media alerted mothers to the risks of giving birth in hospitals that asked them to sign official papers. Today we have, we hope, put aside those cruel decisions.

Today the media is alerting us to a new cruelty: children taken from immigrant parents, warehoused in “camps,” “cells,” “centers.” Think of a euphemism that masks the cruelty. Another New York Times article, with a photograph out of a sadistic Monty Python, shows an immigration judge interviewing a 2-year-old girl. The judge asks the social worker whether the child/witness speaks English. The two year-old, as is normal for two year-olds in bizarre surroundings, cries. The judge dismisses the “witness.” A variation on this theme is the parent caught in an immigration raid, deported, leaving behind children.

In the name of national purity, we have wrenched children from parents. Days have segued into weeks into months. For-profit companies operate the shelters. The children receive minimal healthcare, minimal schooling, minimal oversight. But even if we housed them in Ritz-like hotels, we have separated them from what they most need: their parents.

Look ahead a year, two years, five years. Where will the children be? Will they reunite with parents, thanks to genetic tests?

The difference between now and 70 years ago is that we see the cruelty on television; we read about it in the newspaper, on our tablets, on our smartphones. Thanks to the media, we know.

The light shines down on it today.

Why are we letting this cruelty persist? Are we wearing sunglasses?

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2019

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