Currently, I’m in the middle of living on two-hours of sleep a night in order to meet the deadlines imposed by my professors. It’s brutal. I’m too old for this. Last night, I finished the first draft of my paper for the ethics course I am taking this semester. The paper examines the bioethics of breast cancer treatment; in particular, it takes a feminist bioethics approach to the pamphlets that are handed out to women at breast cancer clinics. I am most interested in the publication “Breast Cancer Treatment Guidelines for Patients.” This literature is produced by the American Cancer Association in conjunction with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. My head is spinning with ideas of informed choice/consent in patient care, patient autonomy, and the gendering of all of this. Essentially, bioethics developed as a modern discipline in the 1960s and 1970s against the backdrop of medical paternalism. The overarching paradigm has been that patients should be informed of their treatment options and, under the guidance of medical authority, make an “informed” choice about how to proceed with their care. Feminists have argued that the assumption of informed consent is based on Kantian philosophical notions of the autonomous human that makes decisions that are derivative of universal good (a one-size fits all idea that there are certain choices that guarantee certain ends that are universally beneficial). Feminists have also argued that this model of patient care does not pay enough attention to social contexts such as race, gender, class (access to insurance benefits for example), etc. Further, they argue that the choices from which the patient can choose are often constructed in a way that endorses treatment trajectories that are embedded within medical and scientific agendas. For example, a patient may be encouraged, under the guise of informed consent, to participate in a clinical trial that the medical authority endorses due to scientific research agendas. You see where this can lead. This paper has turned out to be a nice research project that will prepare me for the ethnography I will conduct in the breast cancer clinics this summer. Despite the lack of sleep, I’m obsessed with this topic. The obsession and drive to research reminds me of why I signed up for the Ph.D. in the first place and makes the physical discomfort a bit more palatable.

On a related note, I stayed at school late last night to work on this paper. When I called home at 7:45 to say goodnight to the boys, Miles (my three-year-old) said to me: “Angie [our babysitter] told me you are working on a big paper Mommy. Is it really big on the table?” Somehow, the link Miles made between a “big paper” to a large-sized piece of paper on which he imagined me coloring made my heart melt. The interworkings of a child’s mind are so straight-forward. All of the sudden, this became the foreground to the research I was madly synthesizing to meet a deadline—rather than the backdrop. I love my kids!