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mamajoanI watched a documentary show on the TLC channel today, which was about a pretty interesting scientific phenomenon; but what was much more interesting to me was the elephant in the room, the racial/socioeconomic implications, which the show completely avoided mentioning altogether, but which jumped right out at me as the big subtext to the story. I am sure that if you asked the TLC producers, they'd say "well, we're a channel about science stuff, that other stuff is beyond our purview" -- which would of course be a total cop-out, but hey, it helps them sleep at night.
To summarize the "weird science" that the show was about, it is a phenomenon called chimerism, wherein a person (a chimera) has two separate and distinct sets of DNA. It occurs when two fertilized eggs fuse in the womb; what should be fraternal twins becomes instead a single person with twice as much DNA as normal. If the two blastocytes are of opposite genders, the result is a hermaphrodite or intersex person, but if they are of the same gender, it can result in a person who appears completely normal. Such a person could have a totally normal life never knowing that there was anything unusual about him/her, unless s/he happened to have reason to get his/her DNA tested.
So the TLC documentary focused on two women who fit the latter definition. In each case, the anomaly was discovered when the woman had her DNA tested in comparison to that of her children, and the testing indicated that she could not be the mother of that child. Woman #1 needed a kidney transplant so she and her adult sons were tested to see if they could be donors; Woman #2 applied for welfare, and they required a DNA test of her ex-boyfriend to verify that he was the father of her kids, and apparently they routinely test the mother as well. In both cases, as I said, the DNA tests came back saying, there is no way this woman can be the mother of this child.
Here's where the race/class stuff comes in. Woman #1 is an upper-middle-class white woman in her 50s, living in the Boston area, a respected member of the community; Woman #2 is a lower-class "welfare mom" in her 20s, a white woman with a black boyfriend and two black kids in Texas. Guess which woman was accused of lying about the parentage of her children? That's right. Woman #2 is accused of trying to commit welfare fraud, the suggestion being that the children are actually her sister's and she is passing them off as her own in order to get the money. Meanwhile in Woman #1's case, the suggestion is briefly raised that maybe she had IVF and isn't saying so, but that is immediately dismissed as a possibility.
So Woman #1 very quickly has an entire team of doctors studying her case, bringing to bear the entire might of Harvard Medical School with its top-of-the-line scholars/scientists and its state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment. Meanwhile Woman #2 is summoned to court to face charges of welfare fraud, and can't find a single lawyer to take her case. (At this point, while telling the story on camera, she started sobbing while describing how she would drop off her kids at daycare and think that might be the last time she'd see them. Here I had to pause the TiVo and go away for a while.)
Of course, it all ends well. The scientists figure out that Woman #1 is a chimera; some of her bodily tissues have one set of DNA while some have another. In a hugely fortunate twist of fate, one of the prosecutors involved in Woman #2's case reads about Woman #1's case in a medical journal, has a lightbulb moment, and gets Woman #2 hooked up with the same Harvard Med scholars, who quickly confirm that Woman #2 is also a chimera and is indeed the mother of her children. The case is dropped and everyone lives happily ever after.
Except not, of course, because Woman #2 and her family still have to live with the trauma of the experience, knowing that she came thisclose to truly losing her children through no fault of her own.
The TLC show chose to focus more on the tear-jerky human-interest side, and then on the legal implications, which indeed are alarming; if DNA can't be relied on, then what do we have? How many men might have been told they weren't the father of their children? How many criminals might have been cleared of crimes that they actually did commit? And so forth. And that's definitely a side of the story that bears considering. But to me the racial/economic aspect is more interesting, perhaps more so because of how thoroughly they avoided touching it.
I mean, as I watched this story, it was totally impossible for me to ignore the disparity here, even in the way the two women were shown. Woman 1 is shown in her fancy home, sitting calmly at the dining-room table reading the newspaper, talking calmly and coolly. Woman 2 is only shown standing, in her kitchen, gesturing a lot, getting upset, even crying. Of course, that's partly because of their different experiences; Woman 1 was never in danger of losing anything (except a potential kidney donor) whereas Woman 2 was in very real, serious danger of losing her children. But still, it's telling. And I can't help thinking about how damn lucky Woman 2 got. I mean, if the timing of Woman 1's experience had been just a little later -- if that lawyer hadn't happened to see the medical article about it -- and understood it well enough to see the implications -- well, then we wouldn't be seeing Woman 2 on TV at all, because she would just be another nameless faceless woman whose kids were taken away. That part of it really struck me pretty hard. I wonder whether Woman 2 thinks about that and realizes how much coincidence came into play; more, I wonder whether Woman 1 thinks about it, and realizes how unfair it is that her privilege was all that saved this other woman from such heartbreak.
(And then I think about having my kids taken away from me by an uncaring state for no good reason, and then I have to turn off the TV and go do something else for a while.....)
Anyway, this got a little long, but I just found it really really interesting. And lest I neglect to mention -- the actual science of the thing is truly fascinating to me as well; it's giving me lots of food for thought; but it kind of gets subsumed by the other stuff, at least for me.
To summarize the "weird science" that the show was about, it is a phenomenon called chimerism, wherein a person (a chimera) has two separate and distinct sets of DNA. It occurs when two fertilized eggs fuse in the womb; what should be fraternal twins becomes instead a single person with twice as much DNA as normal. If the two blastocytes are of opposite genders, the result is a hermaphrodite or intersex person, but if they are of the same gender, it can result in a person who appears completely normal. Such a person could have a totally normal life never knowing that there was anything unusual about him/her, unless s/he happened to have reason to get his/her DNA tested.
So the TLC documentary focused on two women who fit the latter definition. In each case, the anomaly was discovered when the woman had her DNA tested in comparison to that of her children, and the testing indicated that she could not be the mother of that child. Woman #1 needed a kidney transplant so she and her adult sons were tested to see if they could be donors; Woman #2 applied for welfare, and they required a DNA test of her ex-boyfriend to verify that he was the father of her kids, and apparently they routinely test the mother as well. In both cases, as I said, the DNA tests came back saying, there is no way this woman can be the mother of this child.
Here's where the race/class stuff comes in. Woman #1 is an upper-middle-class white woman in her 50s, living in the Boston area, a respected member of the community; Woman #2 is a lower-class "welfare mom" in her 20s, a white woman with a black boyfriend and two black kids in Texas. Guess which woman was accused of lying about the parentage of her children? That's right. Woman #2 is accused of trying to commit welfare fraud, the suggestion being that the children are actually her sister's and she is passing them off as her own in order to get the money. Meanwhile in Woman #1's case, the suggestion is briefly raised that maybe she had IVF and isn't saying so, but that is immediately dismissed as a possibility.
So Woman #1 very quickly has an entire team of doctors studying her case, bringing to bear the entire might of Harvard Medical School with its top-of-the-line scholars/scientists and its state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment. Meanwhile Woman #2 is summoned to court to face charges of welfare fraud, and can't find a single lawyer to take her case. (At this point, while telling the story on camera, she started sobbing while describing how she would drop off her kids at daycare and think that might be the last time she'd see them. Here I had to pause the TiVo and go away for a while.)
Of course, it all ends well. The scientists figure out that Woman #1 is a chimera; some of her bodily tissues have one set of DNA while some have another. In a hugely fortunate twist of fate, one of the prosecutors involved in Woman #2's case reads about Woman #1's case in a medical journal, has a lightbulb moment, and gets Woman #2 hooked up with the same Harvard Med scholars, who quickly confirm that Woman #2 is also a chimera and is indeed the mother of her children. The case is dropped and everyone lives happily ever after.
Except not, of course, because Woman #2 and her family still have to live with the trauma of the experience, knowing that she came thisclose to truly losing her children through no fault of her own.
The TLC show chose to focus more on the tear-jerky human-interest side, and then on the legal implications, which indeed are alarming; if DNA can't be relied on, then what do we have? How many men might have been told they weren't the father of their children? How many criminals might have been cleared of crimes that they actually did commit? And so forth. And that's definitely a side of the story that bears considering. But to me the racial/economic aspect is more interesting, perhaps more so because of how thoroughly they avoided touching it.
I mean, as I watched this story, it was totally impossible for me to ignore the disparity here, even in the way the two women were shown. Woman 1 is shown in her fancy home, sitting calmly at the dining-room table reading the newspaper, talking calmly and coolly. Woman 2 is only shown standing, in her kitchen, gesturing a lot, getting upset, even crying. Of course, that's partly because of their different experiences; Woman 1 was never in danger of losing anything (except a potential kidney donor) whereas Woman 2 was in very real, serious danger of losing her children. But still, it's telling. And I can't help thinking about how damn lucky Woman 2 got. I mean, if the timing of Woman 1's experience had been just a little later -- if that lawyer hadn't happened to see the medical article about it -- and understood it well enough to see the implications -- well, then we wouldn't be seeing Woman 2 on TV at all, because she would just be another nameless faceless woman whose kids were taken away. That part of it really struck me pretty hard. I wonder whether Woman 2 thinks about that and realizes how much coincidence came into play; more, I wonder whether Woman 1 thinks about it, and realizes how unfair it is that her privilege was all that saved this other woman from such heartbreak.
(And then I think about having my kids taken away from me by an uncaring state for no good reason, and then I have to turn off the TV and go do something else for a while.....)
Anyway, this got a little long, but I just found it really really interesting. And lest I neglect to mention -- the actual science of the thing is truly fascinating to me as well; it's giving me lots of food for thought; but it kind of gets subsumed by the other stuff, at least for me.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-28 02:25 am (UTC)The racial/socioeconomic indicators are pretty hard to ignore. Woman number 2 has children from a mixed race relationship, its hinted that either she or someone in her family has a criminal background, she doesn't seem too educated, ect.
Woman number 1 is white, middle class, upstanding member of the community and church, has three white children with her husband of ___ years----no criminal background.
Interesting. Let us now let the elephant out of the room by leaving the door open, no need to acknowledge it.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-28 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-28 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-28 12:30 pm (UTC)You do have people applying for welfare using information that's not accurate, so there's less likely to be a reason for someone to think "this can't possibly be the case!" Whereas when it comes to someone trying to get a kidney transplant, there would appear to be less motivation to lie, and the people involved are more likely to question results which don't seem to square with reality.
I'll bet if you'd flipped the situations to a black woman + kidney transplant and white woman + welfare, they would have experienced the same thing (i.e. kidney transplant gets it figured out, welfare applicant gets met with disbelief).
TLC has a habit of glossing over the hard stuff
Date: 2006-04-28 01:39 pm (UTC)(They also never mentioned the financial hardships families face, espeically with reservists who if they are activated at enlisted rank, often make a pittance compared to civilian life, etc.)
I find trading spaces and the like the most tolerable because they don't pretend to be addressing social issues of any kind.
interesting
Date: 2006-04-28 02:58 pm (UTC)How often does the chimera occur? It seems like it would be a pretty rare thing. I wonder if there have been bi-racial chimeras, since there are (rarely) bi-racial fraternal twins.
This reminds me of the high-multiples stuff in the mid-late 90s: a black woman (middle class) who had quadruplets naturally - no IVF, no fertility drugs - gets little media attention, no one collecting money or diapers for her family, at the same time a white woman who has 4 or more babies at once, due to fertility interventions, gets magazine covers, sponsorships deals, and more. The few stories that cover the black family at all basically say this and no more. The white families even get follow-up coverage years later.
I could see some interesting premises for science fiction or comic books in this.
Re: interesting
Date: 2006-04-28 03:08 pm (UTC)No, the father was claiming to be the father, and the DNA tests confirmed it. Presumably he would have gotten custody, although at some point it said that the courts were considering putting the two kids with different guardians, I have no idea why.
How often does the chimera occur? It seems like it would be a pretty rare thing.
Part of the point the documentary made was that chimeras may occur much more often than was previously believed, since -- as in these two women's cases -- they can appear to be totally normal people, and if they never have occasion to get their DNA tested, no one would ever know. And this is why the documentary focused so much on the legal implications, because if chimeras are less rare than we think, there could be a lot of criminal investigations getting thrown off-track by DNA evidence that isn't as incontrovertible as we think it is.
I wonder if there have been bi-racial chimeras, since there are (rarely) bi-racial fraternal twins.
Yes, the documentary did a brief digression about a baby who was recently born who was a biracial AND bi-gendered chimera. It was pretty fascinating. On the left side from the bellybutton down, it was a black boy (half a scrotum with one testicle); on the right, a white girl (one ovary and fallopian tube, a partial uterus). They didn't say what the external genitalia looked like exactly, nor did they show it, but the implication was that it was weird. From the bellybutton up, the baby looked like a normal African-American baby. Later he was operated on to remove the female organs and create a normal-looking penis, and was raised as a boy.
Re: interesting
Date: 2006-05-01 03:37 pm (UTC)Actually, once when I was a kid there was another kid in my class -- a black kid with blotches of pink skin. I assumed at the time that it was some sort of skin affliction, but maybe he was a chimera.
On the criminal law aspects
Date: 2006-04-28 06:40 pm (UTC)(According to the episode, chimeras floresce under black light or something)
Re: On the criminal law aspects
Date: 2006-04-28 07:59 pm (UTC)Every chimera is different. The one posited in that episode apparently had testicles that originated completely from one of the twins, but most other tissues from the other twin, but the skin orginated from both, so they could detect minute differences in skin tone in the skin cells originating in genetic material from the two oriiginal twins.
Which is not impossible by any means, but some other chimera might have zir's skin cells originating from just one of the orginial twins, and the black light triick wouldn't work.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-28 08:06 pm (UTC)IIRC, the thing that turned the tide for her was that she was pregnant, and they had documented her giving birth and did genetic testing on the newborn and still found that the child wasn't genetically "hers" - and even then, not until after they had pretty much excluded any possibility that she might have been carrying another woman's ovum fertilised by her partner's sperm.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 03:38 pm (UTC)Oh, wait, maybe I do. Probably they were trying to find a man who could be charged child support so that state wouldn't have to pay anything.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 06:54 pm (UTC)They knew that her partner was the father of her other children, but didn't believe she was the mother.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-03 05:54 am (UTC)I don't think that's quite right. Remember what chlaal's original post said:
"Woman #2 applied for welfare, and they required a DNA test of her ex-boyfriend to verify that he was the father of her kids, and apparently they routinely test the mother as well."
Sure, they were checking for welfare fraud -- it sounds like they check all single parents applying for welfare -- but they didn't have any grounds for suspicion until after they'd done the DNA test. They were just checking on general principles, hoping to deny someone, anyone, welfare and maybe as a bonus get to prosecute for fraud.
(Of course, if they'd actually won the fraud case, they would have paid a lot more than welfare to keep her in jail. Plus they'd probably have had to pay foster parents to raise her kids. But hey, they'd have gotten one more "criminal" off welfare, wouldn't they?)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-03 11:50 am (UTC)They were just checking on general principles, hoping to deny someone, anyone, welfare and maybe as a bonus get to prosecute for fraud.
Not quite. When a woman with kids applies for welfare, the state has an interest in determining who the father is, so that they can determine, based on his salary, how much child support he should be paying (and force him to pay it, if he isn't). They use that in their calculations of how much welfare to give the mother. Therefore it's in the state's interest to be sure that the true father's identity is known (and it's in the interest of a woman with a well-to-do babydaddy to lie). Since a not-insignificant number of women either lie or are incorrect about their children's paternity, it's routine to test them all when they apply. The testing of the mothers, I imagine, is mainly intended as a sanity check. Passing off a different woman as the mother is undoubtedly MUCH less common than lying about the paternity.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-04 01:11 am (UTC)A subsidiary point was that there is a huge amount of bureaucracy and suspicion that anyone (a single mother, in this case) has to plow through to get welfare.
Also, I don't know how the child support works there. But here, they determine what child support is supposed to be and deduct that from the amount of welfare they give a mother. But then if the father doesn't pay it (and often they don't), she has to go through the regular child support enforcement system to try to get it. And that's poorly enforceable even within the province, and pretty much hopeless if he's out of province, let alone out of the country.
Basically, it's up to *her* to enforce child support.