Month: October 2013
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Tainted Breast Milk
I have to admit I’m worried. I’m worried that we have so successfully indoctrinated new mothers that their babies will suffer irredeemable hardships if not given breast milk, that they will seek it out whatever the source and wherever the source… My concern is not over the long-since proven benefits of breast milk, nor whether mothers […]
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An exploration of Menopause as a Boundary Phenomenon.
For years now, and especially as I age, I have been compelled by the idea of edges. Boundaries. Something different obtains there, something that differentiates them from whatever they demarcate. They are privileged areas, faerie-tale areas. Think, for example of silhouettes -treetops, say, against an evening sky; they are nothing but edges: intricately crocheted patterns, filaments of black against the dying […]
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A Canadian stem cell bank account?
There is method in the madness, the desperate rush for ontogeny. Cells huff and puff, some listening for instructions, others heading off in all directions like missionaries to new and just-discovered worlds. It is a busy place, the initial blastocyst turning into a multicelled embryo, as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, organs materialize out of apparent chaos, and form […]
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Mental Health in prison?
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons –Dostoyevsky got that right. But in the years since he wrote it, have we learned anything? Have we learned enough? Prisons may have changed over the years to include more individual rights, more facilities and even more education… But for the most part they still […]
musings on women's health 