Are we going too far with optional slicing and dicing?

January 22, 2007

Unnecessary surgery? For or against. Quick. Answer fast.

I am against unnecessary surgery, massively so in the case of the latest candidate: womb transplants. But am I the only one in the room who thinks we are increasingly being asked to shout out a quick answer in polls on complicated medical questions that we had not heretofore considered?

And is this a good thing? Quick. Answer fast.

The classic comedy sketch show SCTV used to do a parody of General Hospital called Unnecessary Surgeon. SCTV was big on soap operas in general. Their major soap was called The Days of the Week, based on Days of Our Lives. Their point, if they had one, was the utter tedium of medical drama. It hardly mattered if lives were always teetering on the edge if the people involved were so foolish, deluded and bog-standard unattractive.

Since then, modern media have become chokingly medicalized. If it isn't Grey's Anatomy, it's ER or House (a show I refuse to watch on the grounds that its set is too sexy for a hospital. It looks like a club. Hospitals aren't erotic. They are disgusting.)

Moving from entertainment to pseudo-fact, newspapers and websites are filled with news of medical breakthroughs that are patently bogus, at least to anyone who understands the concept of the controlled experiment as opposed to the wild guess. Part of the problem is not just that people who smoke are liable to do a number of things they didn't tell the cancer researchers: drink, screw around and skip dinner, which skews the results. It violates medical ethics to do genuinely controlled experiments on humans. The headlines on medical research should really read: "Scientist notices something rather interesting."

The next wave of medical entertainment on the news pages has been the conundrum usually posed about people who have been in a coma for decades. Should they be euthanized/starved to death/kept going? Everyone has an opinion. It is enormously profitable to entertain the masses with a cheap invitation to judge. Fox News lives for this.

Which brings us to — and I know you were dreading this — my thinking about womb transplants.

I have no sentiment about organs. Dead is dead, surely, but a blind person who's still alive could really use these corneas. So take them.

Why are people worried about faces? The transplanted skin unit isn't going to look the same on the front of someone else's head. No ethical problem there.

And hands? They're so handy. People need them. You can have mine after I have reached my expiry date.

But uterine donations are truly weird, like a Christmas regifting of the Shoppers Drug Mart breast pads your crazy great-aunt gave you last year.

Unsavoury. Wince-making.

Look, maybe it's just me. Once again, I prove myself clueless and out of touch. A feminist since I was old enough to sing the alphabet song, I never wanted children and had secretly hoped for an emergency appendectomy. I would grab the surgeon's arm and ask for a quick sterilization while he was in there. Sadly, I never had appendicitis. Indeed, I've had no surgery, necessary or unnecessary, which may be why womb-trading revolts me. Really, you don't know where it's been. Or rather, you do.

Upon re-reading the womb news story, I finally grasp that some women do not wish to adopt. They feel they must give actual birth, even if it is with a borrowed uterus that has to be removed along with the baby during the caesarean, should everything go swimmingly. The only previous attempt, in Saudi Arabia in 2000, failed after the live donor's womb was rejected after three months.

It seems wrong. Surely, that in a world where billions live without even basic health care, where superbugs make surgery more dangerous, where non-rich Americans wait in vain for a hospital bed, womb transplants are over the top.

I know the pain of infertility is grindingly awful for many women. The thing that most takes me aback as the years pass is the terrible bitterness of many childless women I know. I am shocked when I suggest adoption and get a disgusted look in response. They are very hard on women with children. I'm quietly grateful that stepmothers like me manage to escape being their target.

But whatever the passion for a somewhat homegrown child, are organ donors really supposed to donate for a neurosis that may have been imposed on women by a harsh, patriarchal society? And is it sane to risk death, as well as damage to the fetus, rather than adopt? One wonders about the partner going along with this manic hunt for authenticity.

What does it mean when the ability to bear children by resorting to grotesquerie is as essential to your core well-being as an unwrinkled face or hauling around huge saline breast balloons? Surely children are born to be loved, not to be some great prize that will be a disappointment by definition.

I would rather die than have a child. Some women would rather die than not have one. We are extremists, and extremism shouldn't be encouraged.

It is quaint of me to be discussing this, for events will overtake anything desperate humans can envision. Doctors are now hoping to grow human brains from stem cells found in amniotic fluid. Years from now, will I be deploring the demand by alcoholics that doctors replace the brain cells they lost to decades of rye-and-ginger? Probably. All columnists turn into grumpy old codgers.

Particularly the women, I've noticed, when it comes to femaleness. Talk about unnecessary evisceration.