Dead Children Research Articles

FRANK CALVERT KOLEKSİYONU’NDAN BİR GRUP OTURAN ÇOCUK TERRAKOTTA’LARI

Figurines of children crouching on the floor one knee bent up or both legs folded have been found in many parts of Greece and Anatolia, in sanctuaries, graves, and living quarters. The crouching posture was common in eastern, especially Egyptian art. It seems most probable that from there the type was introduced to the partly Phoenicia, Cyprus and to Rhodes, where the Phoenicians traded extensively. Consequently, in the sixth century the Egyptian type of the crouching child found its way to the Greek cities. According to the present evidences the earliest examples comes from Cyprus. Unlike the similars Cyprus type is sculptured in stone in a crude style instead of terracotta. Then the type reached the mainland from Rhodes, as the early examples from Corinth, Crete and Boeotia indicate. It eventually became quite popular. They appear from the begining of the sixth century B.C. to Late Hellenistic and Roman times. The problem of their typology and interpretation, as such statuettes are common finds in the sanctuaries of deities concerned with child-care, are discussed in some studies such as cult of Greek Kourotrophos. They were also found in graves certain cities at Troad. Hence examples of Troad should be interpreted as representations of the dead children put under the protection of the goddess

Van Gogh’s Fantasies of Replacement: Being a Double and a Twin

The replacement child, often given the name of the deceased, is prone to fantasies that he or she is the embodiment of the dead child. Vincent van Gogh was born one year to the day after a stillborn brother of the identical name, including the middle name, Willem. In the parish register van Gogh was given the same number twenty-nine as his predecessor brother. Van Gogh's fantasies of death and rebirth, of being a double and a twin, contributed to both his psychopathology and his creativity. The replacement theme in van Gogh's life and work is evident in his voluminous correspondence containing drawings and references to his art. His parents and his brother Theo are viewed as having shared a familial fantasy system. Van Gogh's self-portraits are regarded as relevant to his being a replacement child. No single fantasy or theme can account for the complexities of development, disorder, or creativity. Van Gogh's art was vastly overdetermined, including extraordinary endowment and the motivation of a replacement child to justify his survival, surpass his rival double/twin through great achievement, repair parental depression, and defy death through immortality.

IS POST‐MORTEM HARM POSSIBLE? UNDERSTANDING DEATH HARM AND GRIEF

The purpose of this article is not to affirm or deny particular philosophical positions, but to explore the limits of intelligibility about what post-mortem harm means, especially in the light of improper post-mortem procedures at Bristol and Alder Hey hospitals in the late 1990s. The parental claims of post-mortem harm to dead children at Alder Hey Hospital are reviewed from five different philosophical perspectives, eventually settling on a crucial difference of perspective about how we understand harm to the dead. On the one hand there is the broadly 'analytical' tradition(1) of thinking that predicates the notion of harm on the basis of an existing subject. Since the dead are non-existent persons, it makes little sense to view the dead as being harmed. On the other hand, there is a phenomenological perspective, where the dead, in respect to the experience of grief, are existentially absent. This forms the basis that it is possible to harm grieving parent's experiences of how their dead are treated. The article ends with a short examination of what harming the dead implies for traditional bioethical concerns, namely, obtaining informed consent from significant others when planning medical research on the newly dead.

Traumatologische Kindernotfälle (Teil I): Verbrennungen, Ertrinken und stumpfes Bauchtrauma

Injuries are responsible for considerable morbidity and much long-term or permanent disability. They are also the leading cause of death for children aged 0 to 5. In high income countries around the world 20000 children die each year from injuries. A recent UNICEF report has compiled data for 2001 on the leading cause of death for Europe. The burden of disease measure has identified injury as causative in 40% of years lost from premature death in children. Drowning and near drowning is the number two killer for children aged 0 to 5. In 30% of all cases cardio-pulmonary resuscitation and intensive care are needed. 11.5% of all drowning accidents are fatal, 9.5% of nearly drowned children show extensive neurologic deficits. Though the absolute number of deaths from injury in children has decreased during the last 20 years (in 1980: 18.8 dead children per 100000; in 2004: 3.0 dead children in 100000), still approximately 400 children die from injuries in Germany every year. The public health approach to injury involves not only deaths but also the burden of disease and loss of health from disability. Severe traumatologic pediatric emergencies are thermal injury, drowning and blunt abdominal trauma.

Anatomopathological changes in dead children with cystic fibrosis

Anatomopathological changes in dead children with cystic fibrosis

Décès périnatal : réglementation actuelle, inscription à l’état civil et devenir du corps

From a juridical point of view, in France, we become a “person” only when we are born “living” and “viable”. These two criteria are necessary, but the threshold of viability is not defined by the law. The general education of registry office leaned on a circular fixing a « threshold of viability » itself based on a recommendation of the Worldwide Organization of Health (WHO). The fetus was considered as viable after a term of twenty-two weeks of amenorrhea or if it had a weight over or equal to 500 grammes. The inscription to Registry office differs, as well as the taking care of the body of the child, depending on whether he was born living, viable and living and not viable, dead and viable, or dead and not viable. In France, the civil officer established an act of child declared lifeless when the child was born living but not viable or when the child is death – born but viable. However, parents of not viable and born dead children, often close to the threshold of viability, also liked to acquire an act of lifeless child, to be able to organize funeral has child lifeless and to inscribe it in their family record book. The act of child declared lifeless allows to inscribe the child on the family record book if the parents wish and give to the families the delay of ten days to claim the body. By judgment of February 6th, 2008, the Supreme Court of appeal cancelled rulings where the threshold had been kept to refuse the deliverance of an act of lifeless child. Her Supreme court of appeal considers that law does not impose de threshold from which the recognition of the status of lifeless child would be possible. Since the decrees of August, 2008, there is no border anymore of minimum of term or weight. Consequently, the lifeless born children after an unprompted delivery or a medical break, the pregnancy can be inscribed on the civil record. On the other hand, it is not possible for the precocious wrong coat and the termination of pregnancy.

The Death of Hamnet: an Essay on Grief and Creativity

The author argues that Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600) was influenced by the death in 1596 of the playwright’s 11-year-old twin son, Hamnet. Beyond the similarity between the dead child’s name and the play’s title, the language of the play, a supreme act of sublimation, does at times seem preoccupied with a kind of linguistic twinning. The play’s variations on the theme of doubling—pairs of characters, for example, and the many instances of hendiadys, a figure of speech using two substantives to denote a single complex meaning, as well as Hamlet’s play within a play—are indirect references to the dead twin, the author contends.

Responsibility and Proportionality in State and Nonstate Wars

People get killed in wars. Soldiers get killed, as do civilians--not only when they are deliberately targeted but also when they are trapped in a combat zone or happen to be in the immediate vicinity of a bunker or munitions factory under attack, or when they are used as cover by nonstate militants. They are bystanders who are simply standing too close. We mourn the soldiers who die in battle, but we are especially horrified by civilian deaths. That horror seems universal; we find it expressed in all the major civilizations and in almost every religious tradition. Catholic war theory, which categorically rules out any deliberate attack on noncombatants, is sufficiently well-known. Less familiar but entirely similar are the Jewish and Muslim traditions. One of the clearest Jewish statements comes from the first-century Alexandrian philosopher Philo: When [the Jewish nation] takes up arms, it distinguishes between those whose life is one of hostility and the reverse. For to breathe slaughter against all, even those who have very or nothing amiss, shows what I should call a savage and brutal soul. (1) A similar, and very early, Muslim tradition goes something like this: Umar wrote to the commanders to fight in the way of Allah and to fight only those who fight against them, and not to kill women or minors, nor to kill those who do not use a razor. (2) Today, we call civilians because they are not involved in the fighting or because they have, as Philo stated, done very little for the war effort. Even though they may be fervent supporters of the war, it is the doing that counts when we think about innocence. That word is especially applicable to the children in a particular population, who have nothing at all. Children have an obvious, palpable, insurmountable innocence. The easiest way to impress upon society the awfulness of war is to show pictures of the children killed in its course. Sometimes these pictures are used to persuade us to condemn a particular conflict, one that is currently under way--one that should be stopped, right now, because these children have been killed and many more like them remain at risk. Everyone has seen pictures like that, designed to influence the viewer. They were plentiful during the 2006 Lebanon war and more recently during the conflict in Gaza. Curiously, we are rarely shown pictures of dead or wounded children from Afghanistan, though the war against the Taliban is not entirely different from the Wars against Hezbollah and Hamas; again, civilians have been killed. Those pictures make the best possible argument for stopping the fighting; nothing can be more persuasive. Arguing Against Conflict The difficulty with an argument against conflict is that it can be made against any conflict, whether it is a war of aggression or a war of self-defense, whether it is fought to conquer another people or to rescue them from conquest, whether its purpose is to defend an empire or stop a massacre. Children die in all these wars. The only exceptions are wars that consist entirely of tank battles in the remote desert or naval battles on the high seas, but there are not many conflicts like that. And some of the wars that are not as limited and precise as those are just wars, which means that one side is fighting rightfully. From a moral standpoint, perhaps, this is a war that should be fought--because of the character of the enemy, whose success is a prospect more fearful than war itself. What if stopping the conflict now means victory for a conquering army; or the triumph of a government bent on mass murder; or the brutal repression of religious minorities; or the survival-in-strength of a militarist or terrorist force that fully intends to renew the fighting? Should we still be persuaded by the pictures? It is because of its terrible cost in innocent life that war is abhorrent. …

Operative Delivery: Yesterday and Today

The normal mechanism of labour leads to spontaneous vaginal delivery in many patients. However, from the beginning of time there has been a requirement for operative intervention to achieve delivery in some women. For centuries, to save the mother in an obstructed labour, the only option was craniotomy to deliver a dead child. The requirement for craniotomy decreased with the introduction of obstetric forceps and Caesarean section, but it is still needed in some situations. The role of obstetric forceps in the management of the second stage of labour has evolved over the last 300 years, initially for failure of the mechanism of labour and subsequently to shorten the second stage of labour for the benefit of the mother and child. The use of obstetric forceps peaked in the first half of the 20th century and has been decreasing steadily since that time. Caesarean section became a reasonable option for operative delivery towards the end of the 19th century with the availability of anaesthesia and procedures to control hemorrhage and prevent infection. The use of Caesarean section has increased steadily but variably in different countries throughout the 20th century.The incidence of operative intervention has increased from less than 1% of deliveries historically, to 10% at the end of the 19th century and to 40% at the end of the 20th century. The continuing challenge for those responsible for the delivery of the obstetric patient is to continue to examine the indications and appropriate procedures for operative intervention.

Learning from the Dead: Wounds, Women, and Activism in Cherríe Moraga’s <i>Heroes and Saints</i>

Cherrie Moraga's play Heroes and Saints (1992) depicts a Mexican American farming whose children are dying. (1) Like the fruits and vegetables that grow in the surrounding fields, these deaths are produced by the agriculture industry's reliance on pesticides. While the adults also experience pesticide poisoning, the play turns its attention to the diseased and dead children as the most visible and poignant sign of the community's loss. Indeed, the central character, Cerezita Valle, is represented as one of the earliest cases of pesticide poisoning: she was born with a head but no body after her pregnant mother worked in the contaminated fields. Now approaching adulthood, Cerezita is a consummate reader and commentator on the diseased and dying that she watches from her window and experiences in her home. Moraga takes as her starting point the very real circumstances of the McFarland of Mexican American farm workers in California's San Joaquin Valley. In McFarland and the surrounding communities, pesticide poisoning took a strong toll; the birth defects and cancers developing among its children inspired the United Farm Workers Movement to release The Wrath of Grapes, a short documentary detailing the problems at hand. Moraga cites this documentary's depiction of a child born with no limbs as one of the key images motivating her play. (2) In addition, Moraga's casting preferences emphasize the importance of integrating theater with community: she notes that those playing El Pueblo (the town) ideally ... should be made up of an ensemble of people from the local Latino community (90). This desire to unite people from the outside of the theater with the pueblo onstage reveals an aesthetic intimate with social activism. In Heroes and Saints, the dead bodies of children are crucified in silent protest of cancerous pesticidal conditions in Mexican American farmworking communities. As limp bodies hanging from a cross, these dead children command attention in ways that their privately buried bodies would not. However, how the Chicano/a on stage and the watching (or reading) audience understand these crucified children depends on their interpretative practices--it depends on genre. The play dramatizes two possible gothic readings of these bodies: one views the dead and injured bodies that traverse the play as an irrational threat manifested by the Mexican American farm workers; in the second reading of these bodies, ritual Christian performance recuperates the gothic as a mode that can mobilize injury into social change. Through the intersection of drama and the gothic, the injured become a locus for protest and transnational coalition. By centralizing death, the play reclaims the dead in ways that counter state interpretations of those bodies--as unintelligible, as public commodity, and as invisible. In the following pages I examine death and injury as potentially productive of social protest. In so doing, I hope to engage various ways of understanding death in the public sphere and the potential of pain asa basis from which to organize a multivalent Chicano/a and transnational Latino/a community. In the play, the crucified dead interrupt the everyday workings of the social structure and the placidity of those living within it; Cerezita's mother, Dolores, performs a wounded motherhood that denaturalizes female nurturing by conceiving family relationships through bodily dissolution, and Cerezita's transformation of bodily lack into revolutionary ritual centralizes the transformative potential of performance. In staging herself as la Virgen de Guadalupe, Cerezita transposes her mother's worn body and the body of the Holy Mother, pointing toward environmentally racist and patriarchal Chicano formations of injured women and rearticulating those injuries into communal connection. Cerezita's performance enables politicized connection through communal histories of pain that transcend this particular Chicano/a and extend across borders throughout Latin America. …

La représentation cinématographique des enfants de remplacement

The author collected scenarii of psychopathological disorders of replacement children by analysis of nine films describing the life, the feelings and the difficult identity search of some of these famous or unknown children born after the death of a sister or a brother and taken as the reincarnation of the dead child by their parents.

Goudge: "systemic failings" in Ontario coroner's office

Systemic flaws and inattentive bosses made it possible for an unqualified pathologist to make critical errors that led to wrongful convictions and “devastating consequences” for parents of dead children, the judge heading an inquiry into botched autopsy cases in Ontario has concluded. “The

Editors' Introduction

The theme for this special issue was initially inspired by a series of engaging and passionate discussions amongst children and media scholars calling attention to the fact that the media seldom address the ways in which war, protracted conflict, terrorism, and sexual and domestic violence impact on children (except as largely passive recipients of adult actions). Children’s voices and stories are rarely heard in the media on such events and issues. This absence exists despite enormous advances in many parts of the world with a growing number of communicative spaces for ordinary citizens to have a greater say on what is happening and how public stories are told. The mediated versions of conflict that tend to be the most arresting, and therefore likely to inspire debates, passions and outrage, are those which are open to visualisation. Often disturbing media images of children in situations of conflict remind us of the multiplicity of ways and means in which they are both incorporated and elided within the experiences and narratives of adult conflict. These events affect different people more or less directly depending on their proximity to what is happening, but it is clear that there is a continuing and worldwide pattern of violence in which children are implicated by adult actions or perspectives, or by the necessities of survival (see Wells, this issue). For example, in October 2001, refugees on a sinking ship (the ‘‘children overboard affair’’) were falsely accused by the Australian government (which was seeking re-election at the time) of threatening to drown their own children in order to be accepted into the country. Evidence later given at a Senate enquiry showed that the photos of this event supplied to the media were cropped and distorted to support the government’s claim. In another Australian case in 2007, the Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse was used to entitle the Federal government to intervene in Indigenous families through welfare withholds and required testing for sexual abuse. Although there is indeed endemic poverty and related situations of abuse in some communities, the willingness of the government to declare special circumstances for one racially determined sector of the population was horrifyingly reminiscent of child removal policies in the early to mid-twentieth century. However, media coverage emphasised the innocence of the victims and the need to act swiftly to save them over any considerations of racism in the targeting of the policy and its implementation. Turning to the Middle East, it is notable that children were routinely deployed in the media on both sides during the conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006. Images of dead children were used in demonstrations in many parts of the world, often stirring up further hatred and violence. Another particularly shocking example of the portrayal of children was the incident in which Israeli children were photographed in July 2006 writing messages such as ‘‘From Israel, with Love’’ on missile shells at a heavy artillery position in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border—missiles that were shortly to be launched into Lebanon. Responding to global public outcry

Dreams of Day and Night

Dreams of Day and Night Robert Cording (bio) Without End Because she gave him life, she must buryher dead child inside herself, a laborwithout end, but one she undertakes.Because she gave him life, she must do soagain, one cell at a time if necessary:limb buds, pits where his blue eyes will be,caverns and ridges to reveal a brainand heart, his neck and face; and after,those first signs of wrists and ankles,his five webbed fingers and toes. Her childwill not toss or turn or kick for morespace as he once did. He will not bereborn. She knows this. But, becauseshe gave him life, her child must becarried with her—there is no other way—for the full term of her remaining life. Rain, Snow, Rain Without plot,the day out- side my windowslips from snow to rain, slipsfrom little drips of water to silence—the rain's presence [End Page 564] within the snow,and again the snow. Inside I can't sortthe sordid facts of a neighbor'sunthinkable murder in this rural townof five thousand. Rain, snow, rain,and, within, without relief,anger and grief looking outon an inky net of winter branches—my exposed nerves will not becalmed by the easy passage of waterfrom hour to hour, so much welling upI cannot stop, so much that outrunsthe mind's stubborn need to make sensewhere no sense is. [End Page 565] The Parting (for a twenty-fifth anniversary) Hard to imagine what sleep might bringif you should die before me,since all these years we've been togetherI've had a dream of a day when we part (there is never a reason), and the partingturns out to be forever. When I call you,again and again, the voice that answersthe phone is never yours. When I wait for you in those places we thought ofas ours, nothing is ever the same:the tea shop's shade is always downand the café umbrellas closed up on the sunniest days. And, when I findthe small town we live in, it could bea diorama of the way people once lived.Even the rooms of our house are not the ones in which we ate or reador made love. If this dream is a rehearsalfor just how little we can keep of our livesof being together, then each time I find my way back from sleep to your warm fleshmust become the reunion I so wish for,but I cannot believe will occurafter the two of us are gone. [End Page 566] Robert Cording Robert Cording's poetry has been published in the SR since 1986. Copyright © 2008 University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, 37383

Whether or Not of Result Imputation of Injury and Human’s Beginning in a Caesarean Operation for Taking out the dead unborn Child owing to the Negligence of a Midwife

Whether or Not of Result Imputation of Injury and Human’s Beginning in a Caesarean Operation for Taking out the dead unborn Child owing to the Negligence of a Midwife

Talking the Real War: Jargon, Guilt, and Viet Nam Veteran Poetry

Jargon, War, and Responsibility Describing the complex linguistic features of the representation of the first Gulf War, George Lakoff once wrote, only scant hyperbole, that can (Lakoff Metaphor). Tracing the embedded metaphors involved in the rhetoric of the Lakoff argues that the way political leaders frame war metaphorically-as part of an appealing fairy tale narrative, a game, medicine, or a rational business model (Lakoff Metaphor)-in many ways influences how people understand war. In Lakoff's view, metaphors, often operating unseen, limit what we notice, highlight what we do see, and provide part of the inferential structure that we reason with (Lakoff Metaphor). Lakoff's comments on metaphor reveal one of the central difficulties in talking realistically about war's true physical, political, emotional, and psychological effects: the language often used to describe warparticularly by those wielding political power-is inherently one of analogy, euphemism, ellipsis, and oversimplification. Killing, the characteristic act of men at war, (Bourke 1) according to historian Joanna Bourke, is something often left out of political representations of masked by the language and metaphors of those discussing it. US troops in Iraq, for example, seek to destroy insurgent infrastructure, (Grossman An OODA Loop') not to kill Iraqi resisters. Civilians accidentally killed by air strikes are referred to as collateral damage, not dead women and children. Phrases such as collateral damage and insurgent infrastructure are specialized terms, their fullest meaning only immediately accessible to those familiar the professional jargon of the military. Cast in the scientific, technical jargon of current military discourse, the violence of war is presented, at least to those unfamiliar the language, as precise, high tech, and remarkably free of blood and guts. Jargon, as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, is a mode of speech abounding in unfamiliar terms, or peculiar to a particular set of persons, (Oxford English Dictionary) in short a specialized language used by members of a distinct group to communicate specific, often sophisticated, and narrowly applicable ideas quickly and efficiently. This language includes a proprietary vocabulary (specialized terminology) and hermeneutics (specialized ways of interpreting or parsing those terms). As a part of a professional jargon, words and phrases, even those in present in common popular discourse, take on different, specialized meanings. Engagement, for example, in military language describes a confrontation or firefight between opposing forces. In other discourses, the same word can mean a wedding betrothal, an appointment, or an employment contract. Words and phrases, as one would expect, acquire new meanings from novel uses and applications by specific groups. Over time, terms from various jargons are interpolated into larger frames of discourse, enlarging (or diminishing, as the case may be) the language. Hacker (computer expert) terminology has rapidly become an increasingly important part of common English, recently bestowing the language terms like blog and googling, and profoundly transforming both the denotation and connotation of the words virus and Trojan Horse. When discourse-specific jargon is exported into a new context, however (from military language to popular discourse for example), meanings proprietary to that discourse are inevitably lost, at least temporarily, as common usage begins to appreciate, appropriate, or alter the original meaning. The result is a disjunction between what a speaker says using jargon and what his unfamiliar audience would understand. Those wishing to confound nonspecialists in a torrent of unfamiliar words and phrases, what Maury Maverick once famously decried as gobbledygook, (New York Times, May 21, 1944) exploit the failure of their audiences to grasp fully the discourse-specific meanings of what they say or write. …

Når døde børn er livets gave - Unisex moderskab og organdonation i USA

Dead children as ";the gift of life";. Unisex motherhood and organ donation in America The focus of this article is how American women, especially mothers of organ donors dominate organizational support efforts for donor families, the implications this has for men, and the many new understandings of motherhood this medical context gives rise to. Based on anthropological field studies from the US, this article analyses the efforts of American organ organizations to support and comfort families in the time after the organ donation and explores the limited options for men to engage in this interaction, except by acting like ‘mothers'. By exploring how women speak about donation and engage in many different social relations to organ recipients and others, this article give rise to new perceptions of motherhood and discusses how gender is acted out in this particular field.

In Pain and Sorrow: Childbirth, Incarnation, and the Suffering of Women

In Pain and Sorrow: Childbirth, Incarnation, and the Suffering of Women Colleen Carpenter Cullinan About ten years ago, I gave birth to a ten‐pound, two‐ounce baby boy after a long day and an even longer night of labor. The labor was obstructed: not only was he huge, he was turned sideways, and had absolutely no intention of entering the world in the way of most babies. The midwife spent hours instructing me in various techniques and positions that were supposed to help shift the baby’s position and get him moving, but nothing worked. In the end, the obstetrician was called and Thomas was safely delivered via C‐section. Aside from a relatively small scar, I emerged from the experience physically unscathed. Yet it was weeks—perhaps months—before I could talk about Thomas’s birth without sobbing uncontrollably: the experience of being in such pain for so long, and the lingering terror that it would have gone on and on and on—perhaps until my death—if I did not live in a time and a place where surgical intervention was possible, had left a part of me completely undone. But as it happened, of course, I was fine, and Thomas was fine, and that was the end of it. Until, that is, I read about what really happens in obstructed labor when surgery is unavailable. I had always assumed, of course, that the mother dies—that I would have died. In fact, the reality of obstructed labor and its aftermath is far worse than that. Such labors can go on for days, even up to week (which is, to put it mildly, an absolutely terrifying amount of time). The baby usually dies after the first few days, but is only born much later, when the mother’s body has been so injured by the unrelenting pressure of the child’s body pushing against hers—resulting in a good bit of her living skin and muscle and tissue dying from lack of blood flow—that her body rips apart and frees the dead child at long last. In the best case scenario, the tear opens her bladder and she is left incontinent, unable to contain a constant flow of urine. In the worst case, the tear opens not only her bladder but her rectum, and both feces and urine spill forth from her body in a relentless, unstoppable flow that—without surgical repair—will last for the rest of her life. Some women also have nerve damage and find themselves unable to move their legs properly, or at all. So: a child born dead, grievous untended internal injuries, filth, stench, perhaps even paralysis. Of course, this is only the beginning: who would live with such a creature? She smells, she cannot keep herself clean or dry, she is not fit for society and barely fit for work. Her husband leaves her. The other women of the village shun her. Her child is dead. She is, in the words of Dr. Catherine Hamlin, a surgeon who has dedicated her life to the repair of obstetric fistulae in Ethiopia, “abandoned to her shame…[and] spends the rest of her life in misery.”1 This is the fate of some 100,000 women a year—or girls, really, since it is usually young mothers, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, bearing their first child, who suffer fistula. The United Nations estimates that up to two million women in the developing world are living with fistula—a nearly unimaginable living death. Clearly this is a public health disaster of the highest order: it is a medical problem, a problem of poverty and access to health care. It is also a political problem, having to do with government priorities, distribution of scarce resources, and unintended consequences of supposedly unrelated policies, like agricultural subsidies in the First World that destroy the farming economies of the Third World. Surely it is also a problem rooted in sexism, in the patriarchy that marks so many societies and makes women and women’s health of such small value. But it is also a theological problem, one with roots deep within our understanding of both incarnation and...

45th New York Film Festival

New York City, September 28-October 14, 2007 The 45th New York Film Festival had a strong selection from illustrious directors: Sidney Lumet, Bela Tarr, Alexander Sokurov, Catherine Breillat, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Brian De Palma, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, John Landis, Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and the Cohens, among many others, all showed new work. Dominant themes were faith, women and dead children, comedy, adaptations, and father/son Oedipal fears. The last seamed the work of the older directors-especially Lumet, Chabrol, and Rohmer, now in their seventies and eighties-but it appeared in younger directors' films too-notably that of the Cohens. Their No Country for Old Men was by far the strongest entry, and its first hour was a state-of-the-art blood-and-guts chase story, a perfect killing machine called cinema. The film later dissipated into sophistic, what-is-life-about philosophy-ridden dialogue that carried a new kind of Oedipal subplot. The older man (here Tommy Lee Jones as the baffled sheriff) survived the deadly son (here the Terminator-like killer, Javier Bardem) but, then, forlornly longed for a mythic father's comfort. This narrative-of implacable death and worn-out, nostalgic older men-became a suspicious metaphor for the Iraq war vs. World War II. The Cohens shouldn't waste their art on parables when what we need from them is a direct Iraq war hit. War itself was little addressed except in the settings of Sokurov's almost fablelike, spare Alexandra, set in a Chechnyan desert army camp, and De Palma's unfortunate Iraq film, Redacted, the first war feature from a well-known U.S. director. His fictionalized version of a well-publicized, real rape and killing, structured as clips of videos, international TV reports, and Internet sites, is a morass of the worst army-platoon-gone-crazy cliches. No contribution to the antiwar effort, it trivializes the war as simply a place where psychopathology is acted out. A few films were notable for their directors' pursuit of originality. Todd Haynes, one of American cinema's most interesting talents, lost the mark in his ambitious and ironic attempt at a biographic kaleidoscope of Bob Dylan's life, I'm Not There. Haynes states that we shouldn't be trying to find out who we (which he sees as the philosophy of the last few decades), but rather we should be reinventing ourselves, and he conceptualizes Dylan as the ultimate self-reinventor. The film is a collage of the supposed Dylan inventions-as husband, as cultural icon, as Billy the Kid, as a black runaway child, as folk singer-played by six actors, including an excellent Cate Blanchett. But none of the versions can carry this grand scheme. The film has no center. Haynes's rendition of Dylan's 1960s and 1970s are only gimmicky and, more, he promotes the ingrained prejudices of those eras as the film borders on racism and sexism. I think Haynes's best work is to come and will be in his take on contemporary reinvention, something far truer to his generation than to Dylan's. …

Images of stillbirth: memory, mourning and memorial1

When a baby is stillborn, maternity units in the United Kingdom and USA encourage mothers, fathers and other family members to hold the dead baby, take photographs and gather other mementos. The rationale for these activities is that acknowledging the stillborn child helps the grieving process. In the context of conventional family photography, however, stillbirth images are contradictory. The body of the baby in the arms of his or her mother, whilst conventional in terms of pose, is unconventional in terms of content. This article explores the meaning and function of contemporary private and public stillbirth images, arguing that they help create a social identity for the baby, reconstructing the disrupted biography of the family to include the dead child, thereby allowing him or her to be remembered, mourned and memorialized; also that public stillborn images reflect the development of new mourning practices that help parents cope with a hitherto invisible loss.