>
>I found the film reviewed here to be great for initiating classroom
discussion on the interaction of these simultaneously pivotal issues and am
wondering if anyone has some to add...
>
>Film Review By Rich Gibson
>
>of
>
>"A Healthy Baby Girl"
>
>Directed by Judith Helfand
>
>Icarus Films
>
>In 1963, Judith Helfand's mother took a pill called DES to prevent the
repeat of an earlier miscarriage.
>She already had two sons. Judith was born in 1964. At 25, Ms. Helfand was
diagnosed with cancer of
>the cervix. The diagnosis was eerily serendipitous. Ms. Helfand, a
film-maker and director of the
>earlier labor history film "Uprising of Thirty-Four", was working on a
documentary about DES. The
>producers insisted everyone get a check-up. She had a complete
hysterectomy.
>
>Wilhelm Reich long insisted that the intersection of labor, sexuality, and
the construction of knowledge
>composes the nucleus of grasping social life. There are few examples where
this complex relationship
>is more movingly presented.
>
>Without spectacle, in an atmosphere that illustrates the profound love of
family and friends, and the
>fear of betrayal that always seems to attache itself to external crisis,
Ms. Helfand painstakingly
>chronicles her struggle to turn her anger outward, to use her loss to
deepen understandings that are at
>once economic, political, personal, and sexual.
>
>A paraphrased and compacted exchange, beginning with her mother, wraps up
this affinity.
>
>"It's not anger I feel. It's sadness. I guess its anger at the company.
It's hard for me to express. I know
>I didn't do anything wrong, but you blame yourself. I'd rather have had
this happen to me. You lost
>your productive organs."
>
>"No, Mom, I lost my reproductive organs".
>
>"You don't have possessions".
>
>"I lost my reproductive organs on top of that."
>
>Part of her struggle was legal, another part intellectual. Ms. Helfand
sued Lilly and Company. She did
>research. She discovered DES was known to have no effect on miscarriages
in 1952, but the
>information was never widely circulated. In 1938, researchers saw that DES
was linked to cancer in
>rats. Prior to 1959, 5 years before Ms. Helfand's birth, experts knew DES
was a carcinogen. In 1959,
>DES was banned--for poultry. For years after 1959, DES was marketed to
pregnant women who, in a
>culture more worshipful of M.D.'s, asked few questions.
>
>She refused to let a collective problem become overwhelmingly personal.
"My way of coping was not
>to stand in a hallway and cry".
>
>She won the suit, improved her living quarters, purchased a video camera,
and bought her mother and
>father a new and safer car. But the lawsuit brought no closure. The common
sense belief is that
>surviving five years after a DES hysterectomy is good reason to celebrate
a victory. But little is really
>won. Apprehension is permanent.
>
>"This cancer gets between people you care about". The generations are
ruptured. Her mother
>considers carrying Judith'seggs, but knows this could simply harbor the
DES syndrome for another
>generation. Judith's companion offers a poem, "I wanted a baby girl even
more beautiful than my
>grandmother...", tendering to replay Judith's own words to him. Still, Ms.
Helfand and other women
>(DES boys were never formally traced) created new relationships and a
sense of solidarity rooted in
>resistance and hope, knowing that much had been forever stolen from them.
Organizing for political
>and legal action through the DES Children's Network (DCN), they caused the
Bush administration to
>adopt laws that will bring some surcease in the future.
>
>There have been many mass poisonings: PBB in Michigan, Agent Orange in
Vietnam, industrial waste
>in fish, DDT, fertilizer in Florida's Lake Okechobee. To one degree or
another, many people see others
>as complicit in their own poisoning. As an educator, this film helps me
set things aright, going
>assertively for the roots of the malignancy, not the casualties. Helfand
shows how deep friendships and
>authentic kindness, not passing alliances, are at the heart of a community
which can help overcome
>what is powerfully portrayed as the embodiment of injustice.
>
>This document was produced using an evaluation version of HTML Transit 2
>
Rich Gibson
Director of International Social Studies
Wayne State University
College of Education
Detroit MI 48202
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/index.html http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/meap.html
Life travels upward in spirals.
Those who take pains to search the shadows
of the past below us, then, can better judge the
tiny arc up which they climb,
more surely guess the dim
curves of the future above them.