A wonderful, grindingly sad story in this week’s New Yorker about teenage mothers in Louisiana. It’s not online — though well worth the cost of the print magazine — but there is an interview with the author on the web site.
One heart-breaking vignette among many: Luwana is the nurse, Alexis an eighteen-year-old mother.
Alexis lived with her mother and father, a grocery clerk and a construction worker who were in constant conflict. When Alexis was eight months pregnant, the fights grew so fierce that she fled the household altogether. Her recent return testified less to domestic reconciliation than to the impact that a squalling baby has on the sleepover invitations a girl receives.
As Luwana tried to draw Alexis out, the phone rang, and Alexis covered her ears. "I’m guessing this is Daigan’s dad who keeps on calling," Luwana said, after the third round of unanswered rings. Alexis met her eyes for an instant, then burst into tears. "O.K., now," the nurse said, "spell it out for Miss Luwana."
Between sniffles, the proximate cause of distress became clear. Daigan’s father, a sturdy twenty-six-year-old named James, worked on a tugboat on the Mississippi River. That weekend, he would be returning to shore and expected to have sex with Alexis, though she was not healed from childbirth, nor was she using contraception."No way!" Luwana said. "Keep your legs closed: embed that in your brain. Tell him to keep his hands to himself. And if you can’t stand up for yourself, stand up for Daigan. You’ve got a lot of work ahead, giving him what he needs. Look around, Alexis. You need another baby in this picture?"
"No," Alexis said dully. Then she brightened: "Miss Luwana, maybe you can write me an excuse note, like for gym?"
It makes an interesting footnote to all those Katrina stories that Luwana, the nurse, is black and her clients white.
I’ve just been reading this article on the treadmill–I subscribe to the New Yorker in hardcopy solely for the purpose–and it’s wrenching.
One thing that makes things rotten in the US is the dearth of cheap, sensible, preventive support services like the nurse-visitor program described in this article which we pay for in expensive, high-tech, generally less effective bail-out services. When my husband was born, in the UK, my mother-in-law said, she was in the nursing home for over a week and then had home visits to check up and support her. When my oldest kid was born in the local charity hospital in the US on a Sunday, where the other new mothers in my room were 16 year old kids, I was sent home on Tuesday morning with samples of infant formula and paper diapers supplied by the manufacturers as they were with no follow-up.
It isn’t just when it comes to childbirth, or medical issues generally, but across the board. The policy is that we’ll bail you out–maybe–if you’re desperate but we’re not going to do a damn thing so see to it that you don’t get desperate. That’s really expensive. So, because a substantial minority of Americans aren’t insured and don’t have access to facilities for routine health care, they use hospital emergency rooms for routine health problems, which is very expensive, stupid and inefficient. Even more bizarre, for working class kids, the military and, failing that, the prison system are the only viable options for education and training.
We pay a premium for the illusion of laissez faire capitalism. And the wild thing is that most people are willing to pay–there was an interview, can’t find the reference right now, with a working class woman after a discussion of health care issues who noted that even though she was convinced that a single payer system would be cheaper and more efficient felt that it “just wouldn’t be right” because she could be “paying for other people.”