Posts from — September 2011

It has taken me thinking about this all week to finally pinpoint what is bothering me about the fake pregnancy Facebook meme as well as the “Win a Baby” contest with the radio station (and just to be clear, my discomfort is on the part of the radio station and clinic — not the people who enter.  I am cheering on anyone who enters from our community).  I can best explain my discomfort through Phoebe Buffay.

There’s an episode of Friends where Phoebe tries to find a completely selfless good deed after she accuses Joey that his participation in a PBS telethon is inherently selfish (because he wants to be on television) while pretending to be a good deed.  He points out that by that definition there is no such thing as a selfless good deed, and she spends the episode coming up with scenarios where she can do something for someone else without getting anything in return.

I agree with both of them (I am such a middle child).  If you’re doing a good deed, what is the big deal if you get something in return too?  Isn’t the point the good deed itself?  And on one level, yes, that is true.

But this is the part that I kept returning to this week:

With few exceptions (as Phoebe discovered) we usually get at the very least a warm, happy feeling of helping another person when we do a good deed.  But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  I don’t think that my happiness with myself negates the good thing I just did for someone else.  But that’s just me; you might be like Phoebe and disagree.

Slightly more murky is when I make a donation but I get a tax deduction.  Again, the tax deduction is a small thing, pretty much a token of appreciation.  An incentive.  Most people don’t donate to charities specifically for the tax deduction, but it does change the nature of the gift a bit to know the giver got something tangible in return.  I feel the same way when we make a donation to NPR and get a “thank you” tote bag.  But non-profits need our donations and most want to have a tangible way of showing their gratitude.

Where it starts becoming a swirling pool of grey (and I can’t really wrap my mind around it) is when someone gains a considerable amount off of another person’s need for help.  So you’re giving aid and someone is helped, but what you are getting in return is something so much more enormous than what you’re giving, that it sort of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  Something like that is what I would call Robin Hood activism.

How am I defining Robin Hood activism?  It’s giving information, comfort, or cash, but at the expense of taking something in return.  The good-natured or those in need are literally used in order to actually benefit someone else.

The perfect example is the fast food restaurant that slaps a pink ribbon on its packaging for the month of October and says it will donate a $1 towards breast cancer research for every hamburger sold. (I don’t know if any fast food restaurant does this, but it doesn’t sound that farfetched.)  Sounds great, right — you get the burger you were going to eat anyway, and a research organization gets a dollar.

But it becomes a feel-good publicity stunt for the restaurant.  They could just donate a million quietly to cancer research and be done with it.  And they may say that they’re doing it this way (the $1 donation for every burger sold) to make everyone involved in the process, but I don’t totally buy that in the case of for-profit establishments (though I think that method is often employed successfully by non-profits).

I think many businesses do things like this to essentially buy goodwill from the public so you will continue to support the restaurant long after breast cancer awareness month is over.  I think they do it because you’ll buy the burger now, whereas you may have skipped the burger if you didn’t think something good was coming from the purchase.  Which sort of feels icky when you think about it that way.  I sort of feel like my emotions have been jerked around for the sake of what amounts to capitalism.

An organization gets a donation, but they’ve literally used breast cancer to sell burgers.

And again, what does it matter if the organization gets a donation?  Isn’t the point the donation or the good deed itself?  It’s a very grey area over what is activism and what is using a group of people.  But I still think it’s important to examine actions, to try to understand the motivation behind them.  At least, it matters to me.

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Robin Hood activism is certainly what bothers me about the radio station’s “Win a Baby” contest as well as the clinic that is donating their services.  They both get an enormous kick-back for doing this good deed.  The publicity they receive translates into ad revenue.  The more controversy, the more listeners, the better.  The clinic makes a small donation in the grand scheme of things (my clinic posts their quarterly earnings and if OFC is making even a tenth of what my clinic makes, $35,000 is a drop in the bucket) and will receive more patients in turn, recouping the money they are laying out for three free cycles.  Businesses create projections, they make predictions of how their philanthropic investments will pay out over time.

Most of the time, it doesn’t bother me.  I am well aware when I go see a show at a non-profit theater and I see the list of sponsors in the program, that many of those people made that donation simply to get their name in the booklet.  Some want to present themselves as an involved member of the community.  Some hope that doing so will translate into more business.

And yet, this time, it bothers me.  Mostly because I see the radio station and fertility clinic getting so much more back than what they’re giving.  Yes, one person will get three free cycles, but I would hazard a guess that the radio station and clinic are seeing much more than $35,000 from this.  So through that lens, it feels like the radio station and clinic are profiting off the backs of infertile men and women.

At least with for-profit entities, it’s transparent.  I know that businesses are there to make money.  It just gets murky when they enter the philanthropic world.

It may just be that I’ve spent too much time in Hebrew school internalizing Rambam’s ladder of tzedakah, but I really do think that how we give needs to be considered along with whether or not we give.  We know that there is a big difference between someone handing us something kindly and someone throwing it at us in anger, and I think there is also a difference between the ways one could go about charitable giving.

Was Robin Hood the great equalizer?  Was he just a guy who did a few things wrong, but at least he gave?  Or was he sort of a dick in the way he went about things?

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Let’s extend the benefit of the doubt to the fake pregnancy meme on Facebook for a moment and pretend that it actually educates the reader about breast cancer.  At the very least, it jerks around a person emotionally for the moment when they feel elation over your pregnancy announcement and then learn that you’re not expecting.  Is that worth it even if someone becomes educated about breast cancer?  Some would say it is.  I, as you’ve probably guessed, would say that we need to look at whether education (if we’re going to extend the benefit of the doubt and say that education happens at all) in this case is worth the emotional damage.

I really liked the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the Facebook memes last year during one of the earlier incarnations.  They write,

But at some point, it seems even worse to use the cover of breast-cancer awareness to make flirtatious, joking statements on Facebook. And why is it only a women’s health issue that seems to come in for this sort of treatment? Have there been any such memes for prostate cancer? Heart disease?

I’d argue that once again, this incarnation of the Facebook meme is just Robin Hood activism that steals from women.  And come to think about it, the pink-ribbons-on-every-product steals from women.  And wait, while infertility affects both men and women, those posters for the “Win a Baby” contest are  clearly are aimed towards women (as in, “Are You My Mommy?“).

WHY ARE ALL OF THESE ROBIN HOOD ACTIVISM MOMENTS AIMED AT WOMEN?

Yes, I really did need to shriek that.

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Robin Hood activism is why I think the creators of the meme do more damage than good (again, my frustration is with the creators, not the people who participate).  What is stolen is the gravity of the situation.  Breast cancer isn’t cute or coy.  It kills.

Back to the radio station, even if we set the money aside, there is more lost along the way if public perception of infertility is further damaged.  We’re angry with the New York Times when they skew public perception and maybe it’s because we get nothing in return.  How furious we would be if the NYT ran an article implying that infertile men and women won babies via IVF.  Which is the message the radio station is putting forth, and yet we’re not up in arms because there’s a prize at the end of this: one person is going to get three cycles.  Yes, the radio station is doing a good deed, but they’re doing it in the crassest way possible.  And for me, that negates some of the goodness of it.

I don’t believe all publicity is good publicity.  I think some publicity can be very hurtful publicity, both to public perception as well as damage to community members.  And it’s on my mind as we slip towards October and the barrage of PR pitches come in asking if I want to write about pink cocktails or pink yogurt containers.  It’s on my mind as I see people posting cryptic Facebook statues and claiming it somehow translates into activism.  And it’s certainly on my mind as I see the hope surrounding that radio station contest.

I think the person who wins the contest has the opportunity to turn the charitable giving around, to bring good from it, in a Phoebe Buffay sort of way, much in the same way she let the bee sting her in that episode.  They can use the platform to educate.  But it is easy for individuals to come at something with a good heart.  I think it is much harder for businesses to convince me that they’re doing things for the right reasons; however you define the “right” before reasons.

Updated at the Bottom:

I wasn’t going to post this.  I wrote it, and then intended to just let it sit in my draft folder.  I wrote it for myself, something I do often.

So I’m not really sure why I’m hitting publish right now.  The release?

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This morning, we were sitting in a Starbucks at 9:30 am when I looked at the clock and said to Josh, “Ten years ago, in this minute, my coworker was on the phone with a student’s parent when the Pentagon was hit by the plane.  He just screamed, ‘we’ve been hit!’ and the line went dead.”

I can’t think of many times — of personal or national importance — where I could tell you not only what I was doing, but what other people were doing too in the minutes leading up to the event.  I don’t even know why my brain remembers everyone else’s story too, but it does.  I can tell you who was at work and who was on their way to work and who was on the telephone.

The parent that was on the phone lived.  A parent who was not on the phone with us did not.  It is so strange to know the minute he died; a piece of information that feels so intimate.  I cannot tell you the time anyone else in my life has died; people incredibly important to me.  Days, yes.  Minutes, no.  But at 9:37 am today, I just stared at Josh and said, “I can’t believe that it has been ten years now since this minute.”

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My entire marriage is contained within the confines of September 11th.  We got married a few weeks after the planes hit.  By the time I walked down the aisle, we had entered Afghanistan.  Some people drove rather than fly to the wedding.  We wondered if we should cancel the honeymoon.

Before the wedding, the rabbi counseled us that we should sign an additional document which would allow one of us to remarry in the future in our body couldn’t be located.  It was a very real problem facing some 9/11 widows; the inability to produce a body for burial left them in limbo.  It was unfathomable that we had to think about signing such a document, but that’s the way the world was a few weeks after September 11th.  We didn’t know what was going to happen next.

We started our marriage with the world on-edge.

It will be our tenth anniversary in a few weeks.  It is impossible for my brain to untangle the two events because the first so closely informed and guided the other.  We would not have started trying to have children when we did if not for a widow’s story in the New York Times’ Portraits of Grief series.

Josh had left the newspaper on the kitchen table, and I read a few of the portraits.  One stood out for me, perhaps because the girl was around my age and newly married.  She had gotten married in August and on September 11th, her ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, was still at the framers.  Her husband was gone before she had ever gotten to hang up her ketubah.

After our wedding, I wouldn’t let anyone take our ketubah for framing.  After the honeymoon, before we returned to work, I went to the framer with Josh and my inlaws and begged the man to frame it while I waited.  I explained the story of the widow and since it was right after 9/11, the framer understood and allowed me to hang out near the store while he worked rather than give him the customary week to frame the picture.  We took it home and put it right up on the wall.

Last night, I thought I heard something scuttling on the wall over my head.  Josh turned on the lights, trying to locate the source of the noise.  He took the ketubah off the wall to check underneath, and there was something so frightening about seeing the ketubah off the wall, even if it was just for a few seconds.  I can’t really explain it except that I associate that piece of art with September 11th, with how our lives so deeply affect other people.  This woman doesn’t know me and I don’t know her, but her life has so deeply informed my own.

A few months after our wedding, we decided to forgo the year we thought we would take before we started trying to have children.  The story of that widow kept informing our decisions, and I really have her to thank for the twins.  Without her story, we would have waited.  So in a strange way, her husband lives on with our twins since her words about him are what brought us to treatments to create them.  I wish I could find that story again, look up this widow and tell her how much her story has changed the course of my life.  I am so grateful to them; so sad for them.  I cannot fathom what she is thinking today, ten days later.  But I wanted to send out this thank you to her, even if it doesn’t reach her.

If anyone finds her story in the Portraits of Grief series, I would appreciate it if you would pass along her name to me.  I’ve never been able to find it again.

Update:

Thank you to Sue and Jjiraffe who found the article for me.  I miss-remembered two points that I was using in my Google search over the years — it was in the Washington Post and not the NYT, and her wedding was in March, not August.  I wavered on the decision to write her, not wanting to do anything that could potentially cause her any extra pain, but in the end, sent her a handwritten note.  I wish her only the best in life; my heart is with her this week.

For those who didn’t read my blog years ago when we used to do this fairly regularly (by which I mean a bunch of times and then not at all), this is a big online round of the Ungame.  What is the Ungame, you ask?  It is only the most fabulous board game ever made.  You just roll the dice and move around the board, talking about your feelings.  To bring it online, I’ve added an additional component of chaining comments so you find a new blog to read too.

Directions: answer the question in the comment section. Then leave a comment on the blog of the commenter directly before you (so it’s a chain. #2 comments on #1, #3 comments on #2, etc). The first person who comments gets a free ride and does not need to leave any comments. The last person who comments gets… screwed. My answer is below the picture.

In case you can’t read it, the card states: IF YOU COULD MAKE A LONG DISTANCE PHONE CALL, WHOM WOULD YOU CALL?

Um… the cards can be a little dated on our 1970s version of the game.

As a side note, my grandmother was so freaked out about me paying long distance charges that even after I got a flat-rate calling plan, she wouldn’t believe me and she’d hang up on me because she said the call was too expensive.

So I’m going to take this card to mean who would you want to call that you can’t just pick up the phone and call.  Which out-rules most people I am in contact with since… you know… flat-rate calling plans and free cell phone minutes means that I’m fairly comfortable calling them whenever I damn well please.

I would love to talk to my first boyfriend and see if he really became a rabbi, but I realized that after I found out that piece of information, I wouldn’t want to keep talking.  The same goes for a bunch of people from my past.  Except one.

I had a doppelganger at camp; a girl who looked so much like me that even my friends would mistake us.  Her name was Michelle and we had very similar last names.  There were a few sets of twins at camp and someone had the idea to round up all the twins for a special picture.  Michelle and I protested, explaining that we weren’t related, but the counselors thought we were just being obnoxious tweens and made us get in the picture.  So we’re in the camp’s twin picture in the camp yearbook.

Beyond our similar physical characteristics, we were alike in temperament and interests and expressions.  I lost touch with her after high school, and I would love to call her (long distance!) and see how her life turned out.  Did she end up getting married (maybe to a Josh)?  Was she infertile?  Did she have twins?  Was she a writer?  Wouldn’t it be bizarre if I found her and discovered that our lives literally were parallel paths all these years later?

Spooky.

Who would you call?

Currently, I’m a little apprehensive with the report of the specific, unconfirmed threat on New York and D.C.  I actually had to read the alert twice when it came into my email from CNN because at first skim, I thought it was saying that officials knew 10 years ago that there was a specific, unconfirmed threat.  I was about to go onto the next email when I read it again and then said, “oh!”  Or maybe it was more like, “oh.”  It was sort of between an oh. and an oh!

We’re supposed to go about our lives but be alert, so it doesn’t really sound different from any other day.  But on other days, there aren’t headlines in the newspaper telling us about a specific, unconfirmed threat.  So it doesn’t really feel like any other day either.

It’s sort of in between everything and sort of nowhere at the same time.

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To ease that tension, on a side note, Cozy has taken to doing a daily urination handstand.  Now it feels a little bit like showing off, like he’s silently saying, “you have to sit down to pee, but check out what I can do.”

Apologies for the graininess of the image.  I took it with my blackberry because it was the closest camera.  And it’s not like he gives me a heads up when he’s about to saunter over to his very public bathroom.

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There is a second REI card giveaway over here.  BlogHer is taking care of choosing the winner from the first one so that person should be contacted soon if they’re not already in possession of a “you won!” email.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “WTF Wednesdays: Beyonce Edition” (Theportofindecision)
• “F-You Uveitis” (Scrambled Eggs)
• “The Viewing” (Three Little Birds)
• “My Best Answer” (Rolling Around in My Head)
• “Spoilsport” (In Pursuit of Parenthood)
• “Those Dang Facebook Status Games” (Not Sugar Coated)
• “Regarding the Facebook Breast Cancer Awareness Games” (C. G. Ward Photography)
• “One of Each, or Not” (Life from Here)
• “Your Brother Henry” (Heart Heal Hope)
• “No More Suffering in Silence” (Making Babies on the NHS)
• “1460” (This is Not What I Had Planned)

Still Kicking Your Collective Ass: Okay, 11 is much better.  Let’s make sure we do it again this week.  There is a whole world of blog posts out there worthy of a little extra attention.

Okay, now my choices this week.

I loved Three Little Birds post about grieving enough.  She is trying to make sense of the different ways she is grieving the loss of her husband and the loss of her mother, and the post literally walks the reader through a path in her brain, explaining how she is coming to accept that not all grieving will look exactly alike.  It’s an emotional, beautiful post.

My Lady of the Lantern has a post about people who pretend they weren’t infertile after they are parenting.  She is frustrated with a friend’s rewriting of her own personal history and the story she is presenting to the world.  She asks a thought-provoking question: “Do you wish you could deny your infertility? Seriously, I want the truth. If given a chance would you do it? If you could wipe the memory of your friends and family clean, would you reinstall the infertile status in their memory?” Well, would you?  Go tell her.

I featured it on BlogHer this week, but I literally love this post that much that I need to also post it here.  Tales of a Batty Nurse has a post called “Loving Who I Am?” and it is about the struggle to truly love yourself.  My favourite part was this: “It also annoys the hell out of me to be feeling melancholy over this. I don’t want to feel like my life is only complete or happy if I have a significant other, or a baby, or whatever. I spent too many years like that. I’ve enjoyed the last year or so being happy with what I have and I want that back. ”  Go read the post in full.

Lastly, there were so many good posts this week on the fake pregnancy Facebook meme.  I just wanted to highlight two of them.  Too Many Fish to Fry has a brave post stepping out of the infertility closet (with an explanation of why she is doing it).  Family Building with a Twist has a powerful post about the various ways cancer has touched her life, and she implores those who participated in the meme or those who want to understand more to read The Emperor of All Maladies to understand the facts about cancer.

The roundup to the Roundup: Feeling a little nervous and a little not about the specific, unconfirmed threat for Washington, D.C. and New York.  Distracting myself by grabbing the camera every time Cozy does one of his handstand pees.  BlogHer is giving away a second gift card to REI.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 2nd and September 9th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Hot 89.9, an Ottawa radio station is holding a “win a baby” contest where they are giving away three rounds of fertility treatments (most likely IVF since the value of the prize is priced at $35,000).  Why?  Who knows — most likely for the publicity this brings vs. the goodness of their hearts and a strong desire to help infertile men and women.

Or maybe not, maybe someone on staff is infertile and suggested this contest.  After all, the quote in the newspaper sounds fairly sensitive:

“When one in six couples have trouble conceiving — that’s a huge percentage,” said Hot 89.9 co-host Jeff Mauler. “If we help out those families or individuals who are looking to do this then I think those people who are against it should see the bigger picture and realize that we’re actually trying to help somebody who couldn’t do this otherwise.”

Well, that went beyond my expectations.

So it’s not the sentiment behind it that bothers me, even though the mere existence of the contest is what has commenters and radio listeners up in arms (most are, as you’ve probably guessed, wondering why more infertile people won’t “just adopt”).

My problem with the contest is what they are indirectly promising and the image they are putting forth in people’s minds about assisted conception.

It starts with the poster which has a baby holding a sign that says, “win me” as if the naked, diapered baby is the goldfish you’ll go home with if you can throw the ping pong ball in the cup of water at the fair.

Just in case you’re still thinking that this ad could be seen in another light, you move onto the second picture, another baby naked, diapered baby with the statement that “she could be yours!” with, again, the ultra-cute caveat: “baby may not be exactly as shown” which appears on all three ads.

Yes, three ads, because there is actually a THIRD version that asks “are you my mommy?”  Of course it doesn’t ask “are you my daddy?” because men aren’t baby-hungry like crazy women with their floating uteruses clouding up their brain.

So I’m really on the fence about a radio station holding a contest like this.  On one hand, I want to congratulate in advance the person who wins it who may not have had the opportunity otherwise to attempt treatments.

And on the other hand…

It perpetuates this myth that fertility treatments work each and every time.  That it’s closer to corrective surgery vs. a game of roulette.  The reality is that treatments give people who would otherwise have a low-to-no chance at conceiving without assistance a statistical leg-up in the chance department.  But it’s just that — a chance.

It is what makes fertility treatments — I think — particularly nerve-wracking and devastating for those without mandated coverage who are paying out-of-pocket.  You are investing a large sum of money in a chance, and that financial burden has to become part of the decision-making process.  If you knew for certain that you could save for three years, invest the money in the procedure, and walk away with a baby, I don’t think anyone would gasp at the ticket price.  But what you are always paying for with fertility treatments is a chance.

And beyond that, this contest presents the baby as a tangible item to be won, and if it can be won, it could also be bought or sold like any financial prize.  This does nothing to help the general public understand the reality of assisted family building, which is no different from unassisted family building.  People pay for the skill of experts.  They pay for the tasks various personnel do for them.  They pay for procedures and medications and surgeries.

But they do not buy a baby.

At least, when fertility treatments, donor gametes, surrogacy, or adoption are done ethically, the money is not for buying a baby but rather paying for expertise or medical bills.  Which is no different from any other baby.  All children come with a price tag whether that money is going to the doctor who delivers it, a midwife practice, or a hospital stay.  Those engaging in assisted conception or families built with assistance have a few extra bills, but all of those are for services — not the child.

So that’s where I am with this contest.  What are your thoughts?