Lisa Moricoli Latham

Small wonder then, that the rhetoric of the stem cell debate is a far cry from the pro-choice “viability” arguments we grew up on — and small wonder that the stem cell debate presents the dilemma of whether the earliest result of a sperm and an egg united inside the womb is more or less a “person” than those united in a petri dish.

Having just scrutinized a pregnancy that ended at the point when most stem cells are collected, I’ve decided to push away the microscope to look at the problem as a mother. I might have assumed that losing a very early pregnancy would have made me an opponent of stem cell research. Surprisingly, it had the opposite effect.

Some embryologists argue that an individual’s life begins about 14 days after fertilization, as the possibiity of separation into a pair of twins disappears. Others see life as a process, unfolding as the egg and sperm (already both living things) join and gain complexity over a longer period. Then there are those, like William Calvin, president of the anti-abortion group LifeNet Inc., who call leftover fertilized eggs created for in-vitro fertilization “children who have been living to this point as frozen embryos.”

Many women these days refer to their loss of very early pregnancies as “having a child in heaven.” The first time I saw this term was on an electronic bulletin board for women trying to conceive. I had tapped into the board as I began to worry that I was in the process of losing my own pregnancy, but it was too soon to tell.

The greatest hormonal changes occur early in a pregnancy, then reverse rapidly once a pregnancy ends, so as my body pulled its second 180 that afternoon in front of the computer, I empathized with my sisters on the bulletin board. Awash in hormones and emotions, I understood the desire to dramatize the surge of biochemicals that had crashed over me going in one direction, only to riptide back a couple of weeks later.

My husband and I had tried for months to conceive, so that afternoon, not knowing whether I was just “spotting,” or losing the pregnancy altogether, I read the board messages with my three positive home pregnancy test sticks lined up in front of my monitor. It was as if I had to prove to myself I hadn’t imagined the whole episode, like the women whose phantom pregnancies turn out to be bad gas.

After a few hours of bleeding, as well as three, unquestionably negative home pregnancy tests, my obstetrician explained that what I had experienced was not even considered a miscarriage, but just a “chemical pregnancy.” Oddly, this new phrase was more comforting than dismissive.

Doctors now rely on the new term “chemical pregnancy” for very early pregnancy loss because pregnancies are being detected earlier and earlier — both due to infertility treatments and the availability of sophisticated over-the-counter ovulation and pregnancy tests. For as little as $1.50, a woman can now purchase the same tests that doctors use to know for certain if the egg and sperm united and have implanted in the uterus. After implantation, the uterus emits human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), pregnancy’s first chemical symptom. In the past, even doctors’ pregnancy tests were limited to detecting 100 units of hCG and thus worked only after the fourth or fifth week after fertilization. New tests can detect 15 or 20 units, making it possible for a woman to detect pregnancy as early as a week post-fertilization — a full week before she misses a period.

Women’s bodies reject early pregnancies frequently — but unless a woman is actively trying to conceive, she’s unlikely to test early enough to know about it. As a result, countless pregnancies end without much ado, dismissed as “late” periods. Like mine, they end before the embryo has developed into a fetus.

Chemical pregnancy relates to stem cells because both phrases refer to the earliest stages of human development. According to the National Institutes of Health’s Primer, some stem cells come from removing the inner cell mass from its hollow shell in the stage of embryonic development called a blastocyst, which begins about four days after fertilization. Stem cells also can be retrieved from the “genital ridge” of fetuses from pregnancies terminated in the first trimester; at that point they are called primordial germ cells.

My chemical pregnancy ended about four weeks post-fertilization, as the embryo’s limb buds and the primordial germ cells began to form, but well before a four-chambered heart had formed, or the tail disappeared. When I logged onto the women’s bulletin board, bleeding and cramping after I’d spent the previous day airing out my old maternity clothes, I was in no shape to absorb the finer points of biochemistry. Nevertheless, even before I spoke to the doctor, I didn’t consider my loss heaven’s gain. I hadn’t lost a baby — not quite, not yet.

While disappointed, I also felt lucky. My body was functioning as it should, weeding out mismatched gametes to spare me a devastating late miscarriage, fetal demise or a seriously debilitated infant.

Of course, it is infinitely easier to lose a chemical pregnancy than a fetus with a heartbeat. (It’s easier still when you already have a healthy toddler.) But in addition to increasing evidence that doomed chemical pregnancies are indeed physically “easier” to lose because they produce lower levels of pregnancy chemicals from the beginning, the increasing popularity of the new term reflects not only current scientific understanding of pregnancy’s earliest days, but also the idea that well-chosen words are a doctor’s bedside tool that make it easier on women like me.

There’s an old Jewish custom that keeps new mothers from bringing any baby paraphernalia into the house until the child is born. While this practice might seem like an anachronism (and is totally beyond my limited self-control in baby boutiques), even today when the overwhelming majority of children survive birth, up to 50 percent of pregnancies do not go full term — though most are lost before the woman misses her period and thus are undetected. Perhaps, as we approach these very modern problems — chemical pregnancies and leftover in-vitro fertilization embryos — it may help to rely on the oldest Western traditions.

Motherhood challenged my once-steadfast pro-choice position. I don’t think anyone who’s felt the quickening could lightly decide against following a pregnancy to term — though I defend a woman’s right to weigh the circumstances for herself. Yet, as thrilled and utterly “changed” as I felt within days of my firstborn’s conception three years ago, I accept the medical definition of his coulda-been sibling’s brief appearance and quick demise. It just didn’t take.

But here’s the rub, important for my legislative representatives to understand: If a united egg and sperm implanted in my uterus is not a child, then a petri dish of similar cells, however poetic, however potent, isn’t either. It is, however, an enormously important source of cells, a potential gift of life, that should not be wasted. As soon as I saw my negative pregnancy tests, I turned my attention away from the changes going on inside me, and back on the child in front of me. As a nation, we should do the same.

Luckily, he doesn’t bite the nipple that feeds him. While I had problems with my son’s oral tenacity early on, compared with his habit of biting the rest of me, extinguishing his efforts to bite my breast were a cinch — a few loud yelps and a good smoosh into the breast, and he never bit the booby again.

Unfortunately, that’s about the only part of my anatomy my son avoids. He bites my clavicle, my neck, my arms, my fingers, my toes and my ankles. Once, as I knelt to retrieve a toy from beneath the sofa, he bit me on the ass.

These aren’t wee love smacks, either. No, no, my boy leaves marks. For a few weeks there, I had perfectly matching bruises in exactly the same spot on each arm. Other badges of motherhood have included semicircular marks on my legs and indentations on my brow bone, and once, my little vampire broke the skin on my hand.

Judging from facial expression and context, I’d say that, at first, my son bit to see what it felt like. Then he bit when he got overexcited as we roughhoused, or when we snuggled really close. Soon, he was biting whenever he objected to being picked up, dressed or diapered — which, as any parent of a 14-month-old knows, was every time he was picked up, dressed or diapered. Now, sometimes, I swear, he bites me just for the heck of it.

When Ian first started biting, at around 9 months, we could assume that he didn’t know that biting hurts. But after seven months of chomps that have ranged from barely perceptible — can I get away with this much? How about this much? — to bare-teethed and patently malevolent, our wee scientist’s experiments are long over. He knows we don’t like it.

At 16 months, our baby knows the difference between bone and flesh, flesh and skin, skin and clothing. Sometimes I can feel him adjust his jaw to allow my finger to stay attached to my hand, or my thigh to avoid being bruised, but I never escape completely. At the last possible nanosecond, he’ll snap his jaw shut to catch a few threads of, say, my last good cashmere sweater and riiiiip it as he turns away, just a little, just enough so that an onlooker would rationalize it as a mistake. I know better. He’s telling me that it’s by his grace I remain intact — this time.

That’s why I cringe when the baby runs to greet me. I have no idea if his open-mouthed grin means he’s happy to see me or he’s salivating over the return of his favorite victim. I don’t mind the biting for my own sake (well, sometimes I do), but I’ve been worried about what unchecked biting might do to his social life.

No one wants to share a sandbox with a biter, so I hit the parenting books to see what could be done to my diminutive dentalist before his reputation is sealed on the playground. As usual, the pediatric experts offer virtually no consensus. The only item the parenting pundits agree on is that I shouldn’t bite the baby back.

One book instructs parents to overreact whenever a child bites. But I think my pantomimes of pain and suffering did nothing but encourage him to bite me whenever he wanted a show. Another book instructed bitten parents not to react at all. But my son took silence for consent; if I gave him the cold shoulder, he bit it.

I’ve tried baby timeouts (one minute per year of age) and scolding, and have reminded him, “Don’t bite me!” every time he comes near. I’ve given him pacifiers and substitute victims (“Bite the blankie! Bite the froggie!”), and on the guidance of pediatricians who must’ve doubled as dog trainers, I even tried bitter moisturizers. (After all, I am the same woman who tried 19 different nipple creams.)

The dumbest parenting advice I’ve tried to follow so far came from the currently (and, to my mind, unaccountably) bestselling baby bible. It advises that the family as a whole avoid not only nasty bites but “love bites” as well. My husband and I tried — we lasted about a day before our son’s silk-skinned siren song seduced us into slurping him once again.

I’ve had to grin and bear it as my son dangled off my skin by his teeth, feet flapping in the breeze like a wee moray eel — that is, until recently, when my son became a talking toddler. Once “No!” became his favorite word, I taught him to touch his nose to say “Yes,” as in, “right on the nose.” Then, on the advice of a lone grocery store mommy who’d overheard me pleading for mercy in the produce section, my son and I sat down to discuss the problem as if we were both as clever as he is. As we nursed one evening I asked yes-or-no questions, then listened.

To my astonishment — and shame — my baby answered. Stunned, I responded with the police interrogator’s ruse of asking a few questions I knew the answers to — and damned if he didn’t catch my trick. Yes, he likes peas; no, his pajamas aren’t blue. He even sighed as if to say, “Duh, Mommy.”

Shocked that he could understand so much that I’d assumed was over his head, the floodgates opened and I asked my baby everything from “Were you mad at Mommy when you bit me while we were snuggling after breakfast?” and “When you bit my jaw and left a mark tonight, did you want to hurt me?” to “What’s the winning lottery number?” and “How far will Intel slide?”

No, he wasn’t mad when we were snuggling; no, he didn’t mean to hurt me; but he was frustrated enough to use violence to get my attention. Whoops.

As for the bites he administered while snuggling, when I offered that “I love you so much I could eat you up,” he stopped nursing to sit up and put his hand on my nose: Yes, “exactly.”

In short, what I discovered over the course of our first conversation was that trapped inside my little guy is an individual, not just a cluster of needs to be met or desires to be gratified while we’re waiting for his persona to develop. He may not be able to predict the next big stock correction, but he needs to be taken into account, not just taken along.

After our round of Twenty Questions, I felt elated — and terrible. Thrilled that my baby could understand so much English, I was deeply, achingly regretful that up until then, I’d done my best to anticipate his needs, but I hadn’t explained my thinking or given him any choice in the matter.

All I could do was say I was sorry, which I did; and in response, he sat up to kiss me on the spot where my jaw still stung from that evening’s bite, the worst, and now the best, so far.

In Italy during my second trimester, an older lady friend told me to get a natural-bristle nailbrush ($4) and to firmly scrub my nipples and areolae each morning. Since I’d heard that the initial weeks of nursing typically bring cracked, chapped nipples, I gamely soaped one up one morning but then balked when I noticed how uninviting it felt just to scrub the palm of my hand.

Once I got home, I abandoned the nailbrush and turned to my “guilt jar” collection for deliverance. Every woman I know has a collection of guilt jars — aging pots of cosmetic preparations obtained on impulsive shopping excursions encouraged by ladies-magazine screeds like “Home Spa Cosmetics Good Enough to Eat.” These guilt jars usually seem like a good idea during a pick-me-up shopping trip, but at home they languish in disuse for years. (I have cosmetics that predate my graduation from college.)

In my collection of moldy potions, I discovered a pot of key lime foot scrub ($7). (It was making a green ring on the porcelain of the shower.) Sandy grains suspended in the lime-green gel made it abrasive, but not as painful as the brush. I used it diligently for half a week, discovering in the process that it did a nice job of softening the skin not only on my chest but on my elbows, knees and heels. I was delighted: I’d used up a whole guilt jar and certain parts of my body were darned clean. But I was further from nipple calluses than I had been before I started. I gave up on the abrasion project in the 11th hour and thought, “Tough titties.”

If only they had been. A newborn baby creates suction equivalent to a hand vacuum fitted with the crevice tool. Within a day of my son’s birth, my nipples were as pink and raw as bologna sausage. They went well with the ankles swollen like French rolls, but I wanted relief, not deli.

The nurses at the hospital said the pain and redness were normal — that the first 20 seconds of a feeding made every mother’s face contort into a grimace worthy of a tragedy mask. They said I’d get used to it. So as my newborn son and I “established our nursing relationship,” in La Leche League parlance, I silently screamed and grasped the hospital bed rails, my eyes watering — and I was still on morphine.

For the next 14 days, I did pretty well. I learned to get through the first part of each feeding by gritting my teeth and stomping my feet; but when the painkillers I was prescribed for the Caesarean incision ran out, I was in trouble. I hit the drugstore, looking for treatment in a tube, but wound up with more guilt jars.

La Leche League recommends (and sells) purified lanolin, called Lansinoh ($7). This waxy goo has the consistency of caramel candy, but since it’s made from wool oil, it smells like the coarse tweedy sweaters popular in the late ’70s. Warmed between your fingers, it’s thicker than the coating on a taffy apple, and it hurts as it goes on already-raw nips. The La Leche book and the label copy assure that Lansinoh “soothes, heals and protects,” but it left me feeling chafed, tormented and exposed.

True, the Lansinoh was effective in one way: It made my breast pads stick. But taking the stuck pads off my enflamed skin was an hourly pre-feeding torture that left my eyes as teary as the baby’s. The amazing thing was, not even the wee lad — whom we’d nicknamed Hoover — could get the stubborn remnants off. When he finished a feeding, he’d flop back, dazed, exposing breasts still adorned with little white flags of paper fluff.

Once I abandoned the Lansinoh to my guilt-jar collection, I was sold a cream fortified by urea ($8) — which meant I applied to my breasts virtually every excretion made by a sheep. It stung, so I sent it to gather dust, too.

At the department store, I found cosmetic preparations that included Mustela’s “dual action maternity breast and stretch mark cream” ($41.50) and a “Buste” oil by Clarins ($27). The first was greasy going on and sticky under my clothes; the second took forever to dry, but both had to be wiped off before each feeding. With a newborn who nursed every 45 minutes, I spent as much time wiping and reapplying boob gunk as I did changing the baby’s diapers. Fuhgeddaboutit, I decided. I’d rather grimace and stomp my feet.

The next feeding cured me of this insouciance, so I turned to fringe remedies from the health food store. I tried jojoba ($12), shea butter ($18), beeswax ($12), Chap Stick ($3) and the oils of sesame ($8), tea tree ($5) and extra-virgin olives ($4; I could’ve used the cheap stuff, but I liked the irony in the name). Nothing helped.

The good news about my failure at the health food store was that it forced me to call in a specialist ($75, less partial reimbursement by insurance). In the pantheon of milk mavens, La Leche League leaders are the lay clergy and lactation educators are the Sunday school leaders who teach classes but cannot hear confession. The only pros able to diagnose a problem are the lactation consultants, LLL’s High Priestesses of Creamy Godhead.

The lactation consultant took one look at the stoplights on my chest and prescribed a new method for getting my wee Electrolux to latch on. (I had to tease him with the nipple until he opened his mouth wide enough to chomp down on the entire areola — thus improving his milk intake and my comfort, if not my sense of dignity. It was my first in a series of motherhood lessons on how to ignore the baby’s cries and/or my scruples to do what was best for him.)

Once my son and I had mastered the mammo-suction gospel, breast-feeding him was the joy it had been cracked up to be.

Which left me with only the cracks in my nipples to deal with. After spending $231.50, it was demoralizing to learn that what ultimately healed my chapped titties could not have been more free or more abundant: breast milk. As it happens, the most effective balm for a sore teat is a thick coating of breast milk that has been allowed to dry and form a crusty glaze. Why, I don’t know, but the lactation guru swears by it, since “breast milk has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties the likes of which science will never reproduce,” she says. Amen.

There was just one last problem: Forming the “crust” required me to sit on the sofa in the sun for 20 minutes, topless. This isn’t really possible in my household, where my husband works alongside two (male) assistants, but I did get my shirts wet enough to coat most of my trunk in a thin, sticky film. Not quite the healing crust my Teton trainer recommended, but hey, pained as I was, I was not ready to relinquish my dignity.

I finally figured out that to allow my nipples to heal I’d just have to wait — and learn to shower without facing the head. For any first-time pregnant mothers reading this: Coat your boobies with a crust of your own milk — and I promise not to laugh till you get past the produce section. Semper fi.

Well, yes and no. It seems that in the estimation of O itself, they are not
so much wrong as they are deeply flawed. The important thing, we learn, is
that they — we — are not irredeemable. The way of salvation is
conveniently arranged in the magazine’s table of contents, where one finds
no fewer than 17 self-improvement articles designed to lift readers — pry
them, if necessary — out of the dumps, out of debt, out of ignorance and
out of whatever rut has waylaid them from their goals.

In this month’s issue alone, O covers courage, perspective, ambition,
persistence, thrift, generosity, charity, industry, intuition, immediacy,
tolerance, serenity and integrity. That’s enough self-improvement advice to
make everyone perfect. Unfortunately, the result of this editorial
generosity is a magazine best described as a pastiche of href="http://www.glamour.com/">Glamour and New Age monthly target="new" href="http://www.tricycle.com/">Tricycle, an ultimately
depressing rag that falls prey to the excesses of both. Evidently, Oprah
wants her readers to serve a higher power and form a better society — while
wearing capris, strappy mules and orange nail polish.

To be fair (not an attribute listed on this month’s O agenda), I decided to
take on the therapeutic assignments with an open mind. This magazine is
nothing if not a tool, a prescription for contentment. I could hardly knock
it without trying it.

So I leapt into “This Month’s Mission,” dutifully “journaling” for courage,
filling out a fitness “contract” and asking myself to reveal my “deepest
desire.” I stuck a rose in my tote bag to “Give [My]self Some Flowers,” and
tamely “followed Oprah’s lead” by posting the four pre-perforated
inspirational 3-by-5 cards provided by the magazine on my bathroom mirror.

Unfortunately, as seen through the O lens, all these good intentions tend to
blur until even Ralph Waldo Emerson (“What lies behind us and what lies
before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us”) winds up
sounding like a bad greeting card.

Nevertheless, I powered on, heeding multiple advice columns that suggested I
stop making loans to deadbeats and stop rewarding selfish, angry people –
which I took to mean that I should hide the magazine from my friends or no
one will lend me money anymore. Similarly confusing was the juxtaposition of
an article that encourages readers to spend a weekend on a girls-only
retreat with one that instructs us to save Sunday as “The Day Just for You.”
I had to skip both concepts, since I didn’t want to book a weekend with the
gals and then ignore them half the time.

I read “When Less Really Is More” (Page 106) and cleaned out my closets per
its instructions. Catharsis, as well as the virtue of charity, came with the
removal and subsequent donation of my old stiletto heels. Next, I digested
“Five Fabulous Things to Do With Fresh Strawberries,” but choked on a New
Age bromide declaring that “wisdom is like marinade.”

Hollywood spiritual favorite Marianne Williamson (an Oprah pet) wants
readers of her contribution to O to add “a cup of courage” to the marinade
(for strawberries? I really couldn’t tell) along with a “pinch of personal
humiliation and a teaspoon of deep regrets.” I tried to do this, but found
I had only half a cup of courage, so had to borrow some from my neighbor.
She was out, so we cut my regrets with lemon juice and served the marinade
as a salad dressing.

Then there is the page of Sunday activities that features a call to prayer
alongside a suggestion to get a free cosmetics makeover (Page 256). The only
thing missing is a time-management strategy for doing both at the same time.
If enough of Oprah’s followers stampede the Clinique counter to meditate, it
could spawn a whole new profession of aesthetician-priestesses who admonish
client-supplicants to “turn your face to God … so I can get your eyeliner
straight.”

Not everything in the magazine rang hollow. I wrote a check to charity and
gave away some nice warm wool blankets. I even prayed. It felt great, like
the minivacation those ridiculous spa articles promise but their treatments
never deliver — though canceling my pedicure appointment was probably not
the epiphany O’s editors had in mind. After all, these are the same editors
who lavished us with a predictable seven-page color spread on spa
treatments.

The fashion in O is presented with the same breezy prose that other women’s
magazines use, which is to say it flogs couture as a pick-me-up, a
prescription against depression. Like O’s decorating hint, “Open Up Your
Home With Warm and Bright Shades of White,” the clothes try to fashion a
bright outlook via sunny appearances.

That should be a good thing, but the difficulty is that these particular
items don’t elevate their wearers via elegance or distinction. Instead they
take the form of one of the most aggressively Midwestern, middle-class,
conformist — not to mention marginalizing — costumes the postwar era has
yet to see. Which is OK, I suppose. Except you can’t wear capri pants and
thongs to a hearing or to give a lecture — never a problem for Harper’s
Bazaar editors, but the voice pitching the backlash garb this time isn’t
supposed to be one of the patriarchy’s usual dupes. Or is she?

In Oprah’s “Let’s Talk” column, she writes that she wants her magazine to
help you “become more of who you are.” Not exactly an easy goal to evaluate.
It is worth pointing out, however, that while the benefits of this magazine
to Oprah’s readers may be hard to pin down, it is obvious that it helps
Oprah become more of what she is: a media mogul.

There are times when the gulf between O and its readers is unintentionally
funny. While the financial advice column lists suggestions for saving $1,000
in just one year, “What to Wear With Jeans” suggests sprucing up your old
Levi’s with a long-sleeved T-shirt in lime green that costs a mere $795. Hey
O, I’ve got an idea — skip the T-shirt and you’ll have an $800 start on the
nest egg.

Not that Oprah’s magazine doesn’t have its merits. It should be a big hit,
for some of the same reasons that href="/ent/tv/feature/2000/05/15/millionaire_behemoth/index.html">“Who Wants
to Be a Millionaire” is the highest-rated show on television. It
underestimates us and at the same time enriches the already wealthy. Oprah’s
origins as a poor black girl from Mississippi temporarily let the reader
forget that no one, and especially not Oprah, has yet lost money
underestimating the American public. But this time, the underestimation
feels personal; O is supposed to know better.

Maybe I ought to feel grateful to O for reminding me of the joy of prayer,
charity and service to my fellow human beings — but the truth is, a week
after consuming the magazine, the only O article that genuinely changed me
was an excerpt from a forthcoming autobiography by Elizabeth Kim.
Appropriately located in the “Phenomenal Woman” column of the magazine, the
story of Kim witnessing her mother’s murder for bearing a mixed-race child
(Kim herself — the product of an illicit liaison with an American soldier)
is amazingly good.

Surely this chilling book excerpt represents the best of what inspires
Oprah, her television show and her book club — and erases all their
excesses. Bringing Kim’s book into a magazine aimed at dissatisfied women
is probably the best possible way to promote it to the sort of readers who
“need” it most. But at what cost to such readers does Oprah frame
journalistic truth with a $185 Burberry dog leash?

“Phenomenal Woman” or not, because of its form/content conflict, O’s most
emblematic page doesn’t feature reportage, fashion, advice or even poetry:
It is a Hallmark ad featuring an African-American schoolgirl opening a card
she has found in her book bag — and it sums up all of O’s lofty goals,
craven means and empty promises. The caption reads: “Self-Esteem, 99″.”