Body politics: how the body moves through the world. How the world responds to it.
Two months of physical therapy: Achilles tendonitis complicated by scar tissue from the surgery I had as a baby to correct my clubbed feet. After I do my required heel raises and stretches, I lie face down on a mat and my therapist pounds on my heel, rolls what she ominously calls “the stick” up and down my calf, scrapes my scar until it’s red and aching, until nausea pulses in my stomach. Then she attaches a device that sends medication into my leg with electrical currents. My calf bruises green after every session.
Before my surgery, my Achilles tendons were so short my feet were fixed in a pointed position, turned in, unable to flex. My father used to say about my birth, ‘And there you were! Two pointed feet!’
But mine is a minor birth ‘defect.’ As in ‘a shortcoming, imperfection, or lack.’ Related to ‘deficiency.’ Mine was easily ‘corrected.’
Body politics: routine prenatal testing can now include clubbed feet.
One presumption of prenatal testing is, of course, that some pregnancies shouldn’t be brought to term. That a fetus with certain characteristics—genetic variation, unsightly physical variation—should be aborted before birth.
So selective abortion can include fetuses with clubbed feet.
I have always been a radical supporter of a woman’s right to an abortion, no matter the circumstances. No questions asked. I have fought for this, marched for this, voted for this. And yet, I have to admit I wonder where we draw the line, where aborting a fetus who would die within hours of birth because of a catastrophic genetic mutation, for example, slides into aborting a fetus with clubbed feet. Or another example: aborting a fetus because she’s female. Sex as birth defect.
And yet, I have always assumed that if I were to have a baby, I would want prenatal testing for Thalassemia, the genetic trait I carry that is quite severe when inherited from two parents: a dramatically shortened life, regular blood transfusions, much physical pain. Have I bought into our conceptions of perfection, of normalcy?
What would it mean to hand select the ‘perfect’ baby?
The older I get, the more complicated everything seems. I’m grateful every day that my clubbed feet were corrected even though I cringe at the notion of ‘correction,’ at everything that word implies about the body—about my body.
And I have always liked my scars, even when kids at school made fun of me, said I should always wear tights to hide them, even when people stop me in line at the supermarket to ask what happened to me. I have always known they represent a thing of great beauty: movement.
But there I go—privileging movement. Many people live perfectly lovely lives without walking, without much, if any, movement. I have bought into it: our conceptions of perfection, normalcy.
Body politics: my father used to hold my feet in his hands. My mother supervised my stretching exercises.
‘10 fingers and 10 toes’ new parents always say in movies. Because a newborn body with eight fingers means what, exactly?
I return again and again to what it means to believe our lives are only worth living under specific societal conceptions of normalcy.
The older I get, the more time I spend in broad strokes of gray.
One ramification of prenatal testing is a slide toward something like eugenics, the erasure of people deemed different, not good enough. In some places, there is a clear increased rate of abortion when the fetus is female. Something like 95% of fetuses with Down syndrome in the US are aborted—even though people with Down syndrome live just as happy and sad and difficult and easy lives as those without it.
What does perfection look like?
This week at physical therapy: a teenager working to regain strength on his left side: stroke. An older woman on the stationary bike: knee replacement. A middle-aged mom: shoulder surgery. A FedEx man: back pain. A retiree who tells me to ‘really push’ myself: Parkinson’s disease.
Everyone, if she lives longs enough, will experience disability.
But some of us live our whole lives knowing its importance, its lack of importance. Knowing our bodies as different and good and lovely and corrected and needing correction.
Body politics: the body good enough. The body just as it should be.
Planet of the Blind 