Four by Four #48

Four Things To Read

Pregnant and Unmarried? In Tennessee, That’s Now Grounds for Denial of Care, by Jennifer Weiss-Wolf

This is the first reported case of a woman being denied prenatal care for being unmarried in the state of Tennessee and the country. And it is the direct result of the state’s 2025 Medical Ethics Defense Act, which went into effect in April. The law enables physicians, nurses, hospitals and insurers to invoke religious, moral or ethical objections to the provision of care and treatment, with no legal requirement to provide patients with a referral or alternative.

There are now twelve states in the nation that have such a law, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In what has to be one of the best examples of magical thinking I have ever heard of, proponents claim the law will help Tennessee recruit and retain physicians. This despite the fact that approximately 33% of Tennessee counties are what are known as “maternal care deserts” and that the state has one of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the country. If you ever doubted that the Christian right is waging a war on women, follow the links in the article. They offer a sobering glance at what’s going on.

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That’s Something That You Won’t Recover From As A Doctor, by Sarah Zhang:

The doctors I spoke with had a wide range of personal views on abortion, but they uniformly agreed that the current restrictions are unworkable as medical care. They have watched patients grow incredulous, even angry, upon learning of their limited options. But mostly, their patients are devastated. The bans have added heartbreak on top of heartbreak, forcing women grieving the loss of an unborn child to endure delayed care and unnecessary injury. For some doctors, this has been too much to bear. They have fled to states without bans, leaving behind even fewer doctors to care for patients in places like Idaho.

Zhang wrote this article before Trump was elected to his second term as president, so some of what she says here is dated, but if you want to read a kind of follow up to the article about Tennessee that I linked to above, one that includes the perspective of both patients and doctors—a significant number of whom are against abortion for religious reasons—you should give Zhang’s piece your attention. I live in New York, where abortion is legal and where, given how much else is going on in the country and the world, it can be all too easy not to pay attention to what abortion bans around the country are doing to women, their families, and their doctors. Again, to say that the right is waging a war on women is not to indulge in metaphor. The stories Zhang tells in this piece make that clear, if nothing else.

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‘Who Am I Without Birth Control?’, by Emma Goldberg:

Still, reproductive health doctors are worried about the new and growing doubts they are hearing. Dr. Nisha Verma, a physician in Maryland and Georgia, and a senior adviser to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said she often fields questions from patients that seem to echo dubious podcast talking points — about hormonal contraception causing infertility, or even changing who women are sexually attracted to.

Scholars worry that the legal efforts to restrict access to birth control will be buoyed by the podcasts and social media posts criticizing it. “If we look at what happened between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs, we see a steady escalation of the stigmatization of abortions, and a steady escalation of legal restrictions on the provision of abortion care,” said Amanda Stevenson, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Those two processes, stigmatization and legal restrictions,” she added, “are mutually reinforcing.”

I have over the course of my life known women with very different attitudes towards hormonal birth control. Some embraced it whole-heartedly; for others—I remember a girl I went to high school with being in this situation—it was a necessary evil, a way to manage what were otherwise very difficult periods; and for others, the idea of medically regulating their hormones was anathema on principle. All of them were well aware of the potential side-effects of taking the pill, but none of them were under any illusion that taking the pill could, as Turning Point USA podcaster Alex Clark asserts, “falsely make [them] feel bisexual.” Or that, as one of the TikTok influencers Goldberg screen-captured for her article says, being on hormonal birth control would make a woman’s “brain spend[] more time capturing memories of stress.” This kind of misinformation campaign should concern us all. It is yet one more example of the right chipping away at women’s reproductive autonomy, either because those who spread the misinformation are working for the right, like Alex Clark, or because they are serving the right’s interests without fully realizing it. Women, of course, have already been feeling the brunt of the right’s onslaught, but if the right is ever truly successful in taking us back to a time when abortion was illegal and women were unable fully to control their reproductive lives, men will feel it as well, since our lives too will be circumscribed by those values. There is a larger discussion to be had about why men should care about that, not just as a matter of caring about women, but as a matter of self-interest, but here I will simply note that I think this is a discussion we ought to be having.

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We Are Here : Writings by Afghan Women, edited by Shikha S. Lamba:

This issue of Usawa: Literary Review contains writing by thirty-seven Afghan women and girls, including an internationally best-selling Afghan author, one of Afghanistan’s most renowned poets, a Fulbright scholar, and girls from an orphanage. As Lamba puts it in her editor’s note:

Nowhere in the world today are women’s voices being so brutally silenced and threatened as they are in Afghanistan. The terrorist regime’s numerous edicts are designed to completely take away basic human rights, remove Afghan women from society, and crush any sense of sisterhood. This gender apartheid, isn’t just an assault on Afghan women; it is a threat to every society still wrestling with misogyny, toxic patriarchy, and religious extremism.

Like the United States. The society envisioned by the Christian right in this country might not look exactly like the one the Taliban have imposed on theirs, but they are moving in the same direction. This is from the first piece in the issue, “Nightmare with Open Eyes,” by Muska, edited by Azadeh Parsapour and translated by Dr. Negeen Kargar. (The editor has preserved the authors’ anonymity for their own protection.)

I left the house and walked quickly towards work so that I could cover the twenty-minute distance in ten minutes. When I reached the bus stop, I realised that compared to the previous days, the number of ladies at the bus stop was even fewer. I thought it might be to do with the cold weather. I wanted to find an answer as to why the number of ladies was less than usual…I looked on my mobile [and] saw a headline stating, The Taliban have arrested women due to their outfits. I felt as if I had been hit on my head and asked myself, what does it mean by outfits. I worried about the arrested women because no one knew what fate awaited them. After reading the headline, I couldn’t bear to read the rest of the article and find out the details. My curiosity turned into fear, so I put the phone in my jacket pocket…After about an hour, I arrived at my workplace. [O]ne of my friends [called me]. ‘Hello Lina, good morning…yes, I just arrived. How are you? I’m fine. I didn’t see any soldiers today. Don’t hold your breath. Is everything ok? Take a breath. Yes, I read the news. Don’t worry. May the merciful God have mercy on us. Thanks for asking about me. Goodbye.’ My fear and apprehension increased after I ended Lina’s phone call and her worries made me more concerned. After that, I thought about being courageous and reading the news in detail. I read the news on local, foreign, and social websites. The hairs on my body stood up as I read that all the arrested girls and women had been wearing hijabs or long dresses. They had covered their bodies, and the main reason for the arrest was a mystery to everyone.

I hope you will take the time to read this and some of the other pieces in the issue. They are heartbreaking and eye-opening and inspiring, and they absolutely paint a picture of the kind of thing that could happen here if we are not vigilant and proactive in resisting the kinds of things I talked about in the first three entries in this section.

Four Things To See

All images are from the Library of Congres and are in the public domain.

Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorū que lustrationes - 1507

Universal cosmography according to the tradition of Ptolemy and other surveys of Amerigo Vespucci.

Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map was the first map to depict a separate Western hemisphere with the Pacific as a separate ocean. It drew upon data gathered during Amerigo Vespucci's 1501-02 voyages to the New World. In recognition of Vespucci's understanding that a new continent had been discovered, Waldseemüller christened the new lands “America.” By showing the newly-found American land mass, the map represented a huge leap forward in knowledge - one that forever changed the European understanding of a world previously divided into just three parts: Europe, Asia, and Africa.

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A new and correct map of the world projected upon the plane of the horizon laid down from the newest discoveries and most exact observations - 1714

Charles Price, cartographer.

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Map of the world with the most recent discoveries - 1811

Mary Van Schaack, Cartographer

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Missionary map of the world showing prevailing religions of its various nations and the central stations of all Protestant missionary societies - [1902?]

August R. Ohman, Cartographer

Four Things To Listen To

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb - Three Kisses

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Crosby, Stills & Nash - Wooden Ships

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Sisters of Jazz - Willow Weep For Me

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Vijay Iyer - Fleurette Africaine

Four Things About Me

My third grade teacher, Mrs. Dollinger, made us stand up in class if we had something to say, a level of classroom formality I had not experienced previously and that I don’t remember ever experiencing afterwards. We had to raise our hands first, of course. I don’t recall whether I participated in her class much, but I do remember being scolded when she began to teach us how to write in cursive because I already knew how to make some of the letters. Or maybe it was because I could write my name—I’m not entirely sure—but I have a clear picture of her looking over my shoulder while I worked on whatever it was we were supposed to be writing in class and getting upset at me because I had finished the page we were on more quickly than all the other students and had moved on to the next page, which she had not taught us yet. I have a vague sense that she either sent a note home with me or called my mother directly to express her disapproval because I do remember my mother saying something to me about it, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what she said.

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I don’t remember this, but my mother has told me that when I was in first grade, I was an advanced enough reader that the teacher used to have me do read-alouds for the class. She also told me that when I was in fifth grade I decided to leave the human reproductive system out of a report I was doing on the human body that I was supposed to present to the class because I didn’t think my classmates were mature enough to handle it.

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One of the most uncomfortable situations I ever found myself in as a professor involved two students in my freshman composition, one a man about my age, the other a young woman who was nineteen years old. I’ll call them Tony and Christina. Tony was a 9/11 first responder—I think as a cop—and the experience had left him so scarred, both physically and mentally that he retired early from the force. I don’t remember what he did before he decided to go back to school, but he was enrolled on my campus to study nursing. If I remember correctly, he had a son about my son’s age. We would occasionally chat after class about our kids, a little about politics—he leaned more to the right; I to the left—and about the state of the world in general. He would occasionally send me links to articles connected to our discussions, usually because he thought they proved me wrong. Those articles often became grist for our after-class discussions. I wouldn’t say that we were on our way to becoming friends exactly, but we were familiar with each other in a way that would not have been possible with any of my traditionally aged students. Christina was a strikingly beautiful young woman who, if I remember correctly, had not yet declared her major. She did, however, make sure to let us know during the get-to-know-you exercise I did the first week of class that she was an aspiring model.

At the time, I structured my classes entirely around group work. As always happens in such situations, the students got to know each other personally. I’ve always seen that as an important part of the group process and, as long as it didn’t interfere with the work the groups had to do, I rarely shut down the “side conversations” they would have. Tony and Christina spent the entire semester in the same group. At some point during the semester’s final weeks, I got an email from Tony that was just a MySpace url—which gives you a sense of how long ago this was—and a note that said something like “Check this out.” I assumed it was, as usual, a link to something that would prove whatever point he’d been trying to make in our most recent discussion, but when I clicked through, it turned out to be Christina’s lingerie modeling portfolio, which I assume she’d shared not just with him, but with her entire group. The pictures were lovely and tasteful, but the last thing I needed was to be looking at images of a student who was currently in my class posing suggestively in very revealing lingerie.

It took me a few days to process this, not because I didn’t recognize that Tony had shared Christina’s photos as a form of male bonding, but because I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation in the context of the classroom dynamic. There may have been only a few class meetings left, but I still did not want the situation to blow up in my face. Rather than have a face-to-face conversation with Tony, which I worried might backfire in just that way, I replied to his email with one or two sentences saying simply that it had been inappropriate of him to send me the link. To his credit, he got it right away. I don’t remember exactly what he wrote in response, only that it focused on an apology for the uncomfortable position he’d put me in. I chose not to address the question of whether or not he owed Christina an apology because the semester was ending and, based on what I knew, they would almost certainly never see each other again. I might choose to handle a similar situation very differently now, but I was at the time reasonably confident that confronting him about it would not have ended well.

Figuring out how to talk to Christina was more complicated. On the one hand, I didn’t want her to think I was criticizing her or trying to shame her for either the pictures themselves or her decision to share them. On the other hand, I also didn’t want her to worry that the whole situation had somehow colored my view of her work in the class, which had been exemplary. I decided, therefore, to wait until after I had graded her final paper, on which she received an A, to ask her to stay after class so we could talk. It was a difficult conversation. When I told Christina what Tony did, her first response was to ask me what I thought of the pictures, and when I suggested to her that maybe it had been inappropriate of Tony to send me the link in the first place, she couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t until I asked her, and I had hoped not to get this specific, how she would feel if she knew I, or any teacher, had those images of her in my head when I called on her in class, or while I graded her papers, that she began to understand what I was talking about. “Ew,” she said, “You’re my teacher.” I don’t remember what either of us said after that, and I never saw her again, but this remains one of the most uncomfortable experiences I ever had as a college professor.

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I have a box filled with journals I have kept going back as far as my undergraduate years at Stony Brook University. Today, I opened at random the one I started in January of 1987, at the start of my second semester in the college’s TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) MA program. In the entry dated February 5, this is what I wrote: “I want to start writing, or trying to write, children’s poetry. Probably I am fantasizing too much about the limerick I sent to Toys R Us, but it would be good to have a few more to send.” I don’t remember anything about sending a limerick to Toys R Us, but beneath that sentence are the first and second drafts of another limerick. Here’s the first draft:

The girl in the tree looked down
and thought to herself with a frown,
“I’ve climbed up this high
and I can’t touch the sky
but I’ll try till a cloud is my crown
but I’m not so sure why.”
So she stayed till she knew, then got down.

And this is the second draft:

The girl in the tree looked down
and said to herself with a frown,
“I’ve climbed up this high
but I’m still not sure why.”
So she stayed till she knew, then got down.

I was very surprised to discover that I wrote this limerick nearly forty years ago because I published an almost identical one in 2017 in Words For What Those Men Have Done as the fourth section of the poem called “My Son’s Limericks.”

The boy in the tree looked down
and said to himself with a frown,
“I’ve climbed up this high
but I’m still don’t know why.”
So he stayed till he knew, then climbed down.

I thought it dated from 1996, when my son was three years old, which is also when I composed the other three limericks:

A boy who was wearing red pants
went out to dig for some ants.
He dug really deep
to where the ants sleep.
They woke up and crawled into his pants.

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A boy who was eating his cookie
in a house that was creaky and spooky
heard a ghost cry out, “Boo!”
He yelled, “Boo, to you too!”
Then he finished his chocolate chip cookie.

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A boy sitting up on a wall
was bouncing his little green ball.
He bounced it so high,
it reached up to the sky,
and he said, “I wish I were that tall.”

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