A Second Chance

Home-schooling for DAJ kids

Story and photos by GEETHA KRISHNAN

PORING over his home-schooling books, M. Suresh James’ eyes light up.

He has discovered something new and is keen to share the information with his classmates. But class at the Desa Amal Jireh (Desa Charity Village or DAJ) in Broga near Semenyih is still in session, so Suresh, 17, waits patiently for the bell to ring.

The soft-spoken teenager, who aspires to be a Christian missionary, now has a chance at gaining quality education through a path less trodden. When he came to the home for underprivileged children a few years ago, he could barely read.

The home’s co-founder, Kamala Sinnadurai, said Suresh was never given a chance to educate himself because his mother neglected him and his siblings.

“His father had abandoned the family and Suresh was forced to look after an older sister’s children while she went out to work. He was already a teenager by then and had minimal schooling,” she shared.

“The home-schooling syllabus here is based on the Alpha and Omega system from the United States. It encourages students to study at their own pace. Every one is supplied with books and learning materials while self-assessments, year-end tests and field trips are part of the curriculum,” she added.

Currently, Suresh is in Grade 5, more or less equivalent to Standard Six. However, he is diligent and hopes to complete double grades in order to catch up with the rest.

Kamala said she toyed with the idea of home-schooling when she realised that many kids at the home were unable to read and write. Most had not attended school or were dropouts with a slim chance of being accepted into national schools.

From: http://thestar.com.my/metro/story.asp?file=/2009/12/12/central/5272549&sec=central

Thank you YL for showing me this. Although tardily late, Malaysia has finally got some perspective — the Star has shed some light to the benefits of homeschooling.

So Alpha Omega has got some publicity eh? Like the kiddos above, I went through Alpha Omega but one difference, I went through the Academy and I have been a proud alumnae for nearly two years.

So what has homeschooling got that normal schooling doesn’t? LOTS….WELL AT LEAST OVER THE CURRENT MALAYSIAN SYLLABUS.

I learned to be self-disciplined and independent. I don’t need anyone to tell me to study. GOOD for university as there’s a lot of independent study.

I honed my writing skills from the Academy and got an appreciation for poetry through Alpha Omega Academy. Where there is lackluster grammar, I excel. The standards in the Malaysian system are too simplistic where English is concerned. Remember that English is the global medium of communication.

I got to learn some other language besides Malay. ¡ESPANOL, LA LENGUA HERMOSO! Although, I’ve forgotten most of it due to lack of practice, learning about other cultures broadened my horizons!

I do not plagiarize..as is the case of most Malaysian-produced students, God help them when they reach university, it’s a literary crime! I remember in grade 9, when I first joined the Academy, I nearly got kicked off the program for plagiarizing my physics project! I didn’t know any better at that time though, going through the Malaysian system for six years. It’s viewed as a major crime in America folks.

I got to excel at my own pace. Though I went through surgeries, I was able to catch up because of flexibility.

I’m used to high standards. AOA’s passing grade was 75 %. 80 is a C for cryin’ out loud! If you fail, you have to redo it to ensure mastery of every topic!

NO WAKING UP AT 6 A.M. Seriously, I can’t wake before the sun rises!

Jaw drops, unbelievable!

Last week, I read about a 12 year-old aussie giving birth..I was like “When I was 12, I wanted to play with dolls, not have sex! This is beyond grotesque, this generation wants to grow up so fast! No way I was mentally and emotionally prepared for sex.” And yes, this ‘girl’ did it willingly with a 15 year-old boyfriend. Her m0m was apparently too permissive, allowing the boyfriend to have sex with her.

Any wonder why I was shocked when my then 5 year-old cousin, who is now 11, whispered in my ear that she has a boyfriend. My older cousin then commented that it was ‘normal’. GO FIGURE. The above is what happens. When I was 5, I HATED BOYS….It was girls rule and boys drool for me. To be utterly honest, I didn’t fully comprehend the mechanics 0f sex till I was 13, when I encountered my brother’s porn on the computer! I so vaguely remember my mom making JUST ONE conversation..that’s it! TO THIS DAY, I am still paranoid about the consequences and hence, I am just not quite ready.

I was so bloody relieved when my 11 year-old sister, asked for a barbie doll for Christmas, I can’t handle anything else!

My childhood, it seems, is comparatively more innocent. Has it all changed? Where do we draw the line on when it’s okay to have sex?

The youngest child ever to give birth I thought. But I found something different on the nternet, something that made my jaw drop.

“There are always some kinds of records that you just can’t believe. These cases are outside the borders of rational thinking. The youngest mother was a 5 year old Peruvian girl. I thought it’s just an other urban legend, but the images and the sources persuaded me. A five year old girl is not matured enough to give birth to a child. The absence of puberty, menstrual cycle, proper development of the uterus makes it impossible, but:

Her name was Lina Medina, a Peruvian girl from the Andean village of Ticrapo… Lina’s parents initially thought their daughter had a large abdominal tumor… but Lina was eventually transferred to a hospital in Lima, where she delivered a six-pound baby boy by Cesarean section on 14 May 1939. Lina’s father was temporarily jailed on suspicion of incest, but he was released for a lack of evidence and authorities were never ableto determine who fathered Lina’s child.”

From:http://scienceroll.com/2006/12/09/the-youngest-mother-ever/

I know, shocking right?

The Plight of Women

I really wonder why this is like a global pandemic, where women are treated as inferior to men when in actual fact, we are not. The only difference is that some nations have made progress, and others are still stuck on stigmatizing women. Why, ohy why are they treated this way, when most of the problems of this world are caused by men. Just take a look at history and you’ll see why.

Sigh. I am sad at this.

India’s neglected widows

 

The world’s first international conference on widows in South Asia is designed to highlight the suffering of women who are often excluded and marginalised.

India alone has almost 40 million widows.

Traditionally Hinduism frowns on widows remarrying and many have their social and economic power eroded too – although in recent years many widows have benefited from moves to enhance their status.

We treat widowhood not as a natural stage in the life cycle of a woman, we treat it as some kind of an aberration

Conference organiser Meera Khanna

 

Vrindavan is a pilgrimage town now home to thousands of destitute widows.

Ashtabala Mundo is one of thousands of widows who have been driven by poverty to the holy town.

She was married off when she was still a baby and widowed when she was still a child.

“We have to come and sing here morning, noon and night and for all that I only get is $10 a month,” she said.

“By the time I’ve paid the rent, I can’t afford to buy cooking oil. So I often go all day without a hot meal,” Mrs Mundo said.

On the sidelines

The women line up, after singing for several hours, to receive a cup of rice and a few teaspoons of lentils. It isn’t much.

Ahstabala Mundo: Widowed when still a child

In India, widows are an invisible community.

Meera Khanna, one of the conference organisers, says although many widows are treated less harshly nowadays, they still face discrimination and neglect.

“We treat widowhood not as a natural stage in the life cycle of a woman, we treat it as some kind of an aberration. We accept death but we don’t accept widowhood,” she said.

“Because somewhere in the Indian psyche, the woman’s identity is with the man and the minute he’s not there, it’s something that cannot be accepted.”

Mr Madhav of Vrindavan’s Shri Bhagwan Bhajan Ashram temple society says more than a thousand widows a day come to his temple alone.

“Most of them are very poor and once their husbands die, they have to come here. We can at least give them food and clothes.”

Sad tales

Outside, loudspeakers play songs honouring Lord Krishna, in the town associated with the Hindu God.

I’ve been too ill to sing at the temple for the last three days so I haven’t had a thing to eat

Nirmala Dasi, 85

Many of the widows who flock here have nowhere else to go.

Hindu widows are not supposed to remarry. With little social or economic status, many become destitute.

We met Nirmala Dasi, a frail 85-year-old, begging at the temple gate.

When she spoke, she dissolved into tears.

Some sing at local temples in order to get food

“I’ve been too ill to sing at the temple for the last three days so I haven’t had a thing to eat. You don’t get anything unless you go there.”

We were soon surrounded by widows with sad stories to tell.

“I spend almost everything I get on a room I share with four others. I’ve no relatives, or I wouldn’t be here,” said Mithila.

“It’s so cold here, I’m always freezing.”

Widows have been a marginalised and deprived group for generations.

This conference aims to highlight their suffering – and stop so many women from losing their dignity and basic rights when they lose their husbands.

 From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1795564.stm

Not God is Truth but Truth is God

Gandhi’s Views On Truth
Truth Is God

God Is
THERE IS an indefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is this unseen Power which makes itself felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses. But it is possible to reason out the existence of God to a limited extent.
I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever-dying, there is underlying all that change a Living Power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves, and re-creates. That informing Power or Spirit is God. And since nothing else I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is.
And is this Power benevolent or malevolent? I see it as purely benevolent. For I can see, that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists. Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love. He is the Supreme Good.
I confess… that I have no argument to convince… through reason. Faith transcends reason. All I can advise… is not to attempt the impossible. I cannot account for the existence of evil by any rational method. To want to do so is to be co-equal with God. I am, therefore, humble enough to recognize evil as such; and I call God long-suffering and patient precisely because He permits evil in the world. I know that He has no evil in Him and yet if there is evil, He is the author of it and yet untouched by it.
I know, too, that I shall never know God if I do not wrestle with and against evil even at the cost of life itself. I am fortified in the belief by my own humble and limited experience. The purer I try to become the nearer to God I feel myself to be. How much more should I be near to Him when my faith is not a mere apology, as it is today, but has become as immovable as the Himalayas and as white and bright as the snows on their peaks?

My Faith
I can easily put up with the denial of the world, but any denial by me of God is unthinkable.
I know that I can do nothing. God can do everything. O God, make me Thy fit instrument and use as thou wilt!
I have not seen Him, neither have I known Him. I have made the world’s faith in God my own and as my faith is ineffaceable, I regard that faith as amounting to experience. However, as it may be said that to describe faith, as experience is to tamper with truth, it may perhaps be more correct to say that I have no word for characterizing my belief in God.
I am surer of His existence than of the fact that you and I are sitting in this room. Then I can also testify that I may live without air and water but not without Him. You may pluck out my eyes, but that cannot kill me. You may chop off my nose, but that will not kill me. But blast my belief in God, and I am dead.
You may call this a superstition, but I confess it is a superstition that I hug, even as I used to hug the name of Rama in my childhood when there was any cause of danger or alarm. That was what an old nurse had taught me.
I believe that we can all become messengers of God, if we cease to fear man and seek only God’s Truth. I do believe I am seeking only God’s Truth and have lost all fear of man.
…I have no special revelation of God’s will. My firm belief is that He reveals Himself daily to every human being, but we shut our ears to the ’still small voice’. We shut our eyes to the Pillar of Fire in front of us. I realize His omnipresence.
Some of my correspondents seem to think that I can work wonders. Let me say as a devotee of truth that I have no such gift. All the power I may have comes from God. But He does not work directly. He works through His numberless agencies.

Nature of God
To me God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality; God is fearlessness. God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist. For in His boundless love God permits the atheist to live. He is the searcher of hearts. He transcends speech and reason. He knows us and our hearts better than we do ourselves. He does not take us at our word, for He knows that we often do not mean it, some knowingly and others unknowingly.
He is a personal God to those who need His personal presence. He is embodied to those who need His touch. He is the purest essence. He simply is to those who have faith. He is all things to all men. He is in us and yet above and beyond us…
He cannot cease to be because hideous immoralities or inhuman brutalities are committed in His name. He is long-suffering. He is patient but He is also terrible. He is the most exacting personage in the world and the world to come. He metes out the same measure to us that we mete out to our neighbors-men and brutes.
With Him ignorance is no excuse. And withal He is ever forgiving, for He always gives us the chance to repent.
He is the greatest democrat the world knows, for He leaves us ‘unfettered’ to make our own choice between evil and good. He is the greatest tyrant ever know, for He often dashes the cup from our lips and under cove of free will leaves us a margin so wholly inadequate as to provide only mirth for Himself at our expense.
Therefore it is that Hinduism calls it all His sport-lila, or calls it all an illusion-maya. We are not, He alone Is. And if we will be, we must eternally sing His praise and do His will. Let us dance to the tune of His bansi-lute, and all would be well.
God is the hardest taskmaster I have known on this earth, and He tries you through and through. And when you find that your faith is failing or your body is failing you and you are sinking, He comes to your assistance somehow or other and proves to you that you must not lose your faith and that He is always at your beck and call, but on His terms, not on your terms. So I have found. I cannot really recall a single instance when, at the eleventh hour, He has forsaken me.
In my early youth I was taught to repeat what in Hindu scriptures are known as one thousand names of God. But these one thousand names of God were by no means exhaustive. We believe–and I think it is the truth–that God has as many names as there are creatures and, therefore, we also say that God is nameless and, since God has many forms, we also consider Him formless, and since He speaks to us through many tongues, we consider Him to be speechless and so on. And so when I came to study Islam, I found that Islam too had many names for God.
I would say with those who say God is Love, God is Love. But deep down in me I used to say that though God may be Love, God is Truth, above all. If it is possible for the human tongue to give the fullest description of God, I have come to the conclusion that, for myself, God is Truth.
But two years ago I went a step further and said that Truth is God. You will see the fine distinction between the two statements, viz., that God is Truth and Truth is God. And I came to the conclusion after a continuous and relentless search after Truth, which began nearly fifty years ago.
I then found that the nearest approach to Truth was through love. But I also found that love has many meanings in the English language at least and that human love in the sense of passion could become a degrading thing also. I found too that love in the sense of ahimsa had only a limited number of votaries in the world. But I never found a double meaning in connection with truth and not even atheist had demurred to the necessity or power of truth.
But, in their passion for discovering truth, the atheists have not hesitated to deny the very existence of God–from their own point of view, rightly. And it was because of this reasoning that I saw that, rather than say that God is Truth, I should say that Truth is God.
God is Truth, but God is many other things also. That is why I say Truth is God…. Only remember that Truth is not one of the many qualities that we name. It is the living embodiments of God, it is the only Life, and I identify Truth with the fullest life, and that is how it becomes a concrete thing, for God is His whole creation, the whole Existence, and service of all that exists-Truth-is service of God.
Perfection is the attribute of the Almighty, and yet what a great democrat He is! What an amount of wrong and humbug He suffers on our part! He even suffers us insignificant creatures of His to question His very existence, though He is in every atom about us, around us and within us. But He has reserved to Himself the right of becoming manifest to whomsoever He chooses. He is a Being without hands and feet and other organs, yet he can see Him to whom He chooses to reveal Himself.

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God Through Service
If I did not fee the presence of God within me, I see so much of misery and disappointment every day that I would be a raving maniac and my destination would be the Hooghli.
If I am to identify myself with the grief of the least in India, aye, if I have the power, the least in the world, let me identify myself with the sins of the little ones who are under my care. And so doing in all humility, I hope some day to see God–Truth–face to face.
I am endeavoring to see God through service of humanity, for I know that God is neither in heaven, nor in down below, but in every one.
I am a part and parcel of the whole, and I cannot find Him apart from the rest of humanity. My countrymen are my nearest neighbors. They have become so helpless, so resourceless, so inert that I must concentrate on serving them. If I could persuade myself that I should find Him in a Himalayan cave, I would proceed there immediately. But I know that I cannot find Him apart from humanity.
I claim to know my millions. All the 24 hours of the day I am with them. They are my first care and last because I recognize no God except the God that is to be found in the hearts of the dumb millions. They do not recognize His presence; I do. And I worship the God that is Truth or Truth, which is God through the service of these millions.

Guide and Protector
I must go… with God as my only guide. He is a jealous Lord. He will allow no one to share His authority. One has, therefore, to appear before Him in all one’s weakness, empty-handed and in a spirit of full surrender, and then He enables you to stand before a whole world and protects you from all harm.
I have learned this one lesson–that what is impossible with man is child’s play with God and if we have faith in that Divinity which presides on the destiny of the meanest of His creation, I have no doubt that all things are possible; and in that final hope, I live and pass my time and endeavor to obey His will.
Even in darkest despair, where there seems to be no helper and no comfort in the wide, wide world, His Name inspires us with strength and puts all doubts and despairs to flight. The sky may be overcast today with clouds, but a fervent prayer to Him is enough to dispel them. It is because of prayer that I have known no disappointment.
…I have known no despair. Why then should you give way to it? Let us pray that He may cleanse our hearts of pettinesses, meannesses and deceit and He will surely answer our prayers. Many I know have always turned to that unfailing source of strength.
I have seen and believe that God never appears to you in person, but in action which can only account for your deliverance in your darkest hour.
Individual worship cannot be described in words. It goes on continuously and even unconsciously. There is not a moment when I do not feel the presence of a Witness whose eye misses nothing and with whom I strive to keep in tune.
I have never found Him lacking in response. I have found Him nearest at hand when the horizon seemed darkest in my ordeals in jails when it was not all-smooth sailing for me. I cannot recall a moment in my life when I had a sense of desertion by God.

Self-realization
I believe it to be possible for every human being to attain to that blessed and indescribable, sinless state in which he feels within himself the presence of God to the exclusion of everything else.
What I want to achieve, -what I have been striving and pining to achieve…,–is self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain moksha. I live and move and have my being in pursuit of this goal. All that I do by way of speaking and writing and all my ventures in the political field are directed to this same end.
For it is an unbroken torture to me that I am still so far from Him, who, as I fully know, governs every breath of my life, and whose offspring I am. I know that it is the evil passions within that keep me so far from Him, and yet I cannot get away from them.
This belief in God has to be based on faith, which transcends reasons. Indeed, even the so-called realization has at bottom an element of faith without which it cannot be sustained. In the very nature of things it must be so. Who can transgress the limitations of his being?
I hold that complete realization is impossible in this embodied life. Nor is it necessary. A living immovable faith is all that is required for reaching the full spiritual height attainable by human beings. God is not outside this earthly case of ours. Therefore, exterior proof is not of much avail, if any at all.
We must ever fail to perceive Him through the senses, because He is beyond them. We can feel Him if we will but withdraw ourselves from the senses. The divine music is incessantly going on within ourselves, but the loud senses drown the delicate music, which is unlike and infinitely superior to anything we can perceive or hear with our senses.

- M. K. Gandhi

 

Friendship

We can learn A LOT from animals.

Tiger, lion and bear form unusual friendship

Baloo the bear, Leo the Lion and Shere Khan the tiger have the most unusual and unlikely friendship between them.

Rescued eight years ago during a police drugs raid in Atlanta, Georgia, the three friends were only cubs at the time and barely two months old.

They had been kept as status symbol pets by the drug barons.

Delivered to the Noah’s Ark animal rescue centre in Locust Grove, Georgia, the decision was made to keep the youngsters together.

“We could have separated them, but since they came as a kind of family, the zoo decided to keep them together,” said Diane Smith, assistant director of the Noah’s Ark zoo.

“To our knowledge, this is the only place where you’ll find this combination of animals together, they are our BLT, (bear, lion and tiger).

Living with the zoo’s founders for the past eight years, Shere Khan, Baloo and Leo have now moved to a purpose built habitat were the US public can now witness first hand their touching relationship.

“We didn’t have the money to move them at first,” said DIane.

“Now their habitat is sorted and they have been moved away from the children’s zoo areas where the public couldn’t really get a good look.

“Now, though, it is possible to see Baloo, who is a 1,000 pound bear, Shere Khan, a 350 pound tiger and Leo, who is also 350 pounds messing around like brothers.

“They are totally oblivious to the fact that in any other circumstance they would not be friends.”

Handled by Charles and Jama Hedgecoth, the zoo’s owners and founders, the three friendly giants appear to have have no comprehension of their animal differences.

“Baloo and Shere Khan are very close,” says DIane.

“That is because they rise early, as Leo being a lion likes to spend most the day sleeping.

“It is wonderful and magical to see a giant American Black Bear put his arm around a Bengal tiger and then to see the tiger nuzzle up to the bear like a domestic cat.

“When Leo wakes up the three of them mess around for most of the day before they settle down to some food.”

Surprisingly for three apex predators with the power to kill with a single bite or swipe of their paw, they are very relaxed around each other.

‘”They eat, sleep and play together,” said Jama Hedgecoth, founder of Noah’s Ark zoo.

“As they treat each other as siblings they will lie on top of each other for heat and simply for affection.

“At the moment they are getting used to their new habitat.

“Shere Khan is being quite reticent about the move, but Baloo, the bear is very good at leading him on and making him feel comfortable and safe.”

Explaining that the three ‘brothers’ have always seemed to share a unique bond, Charles Hedgecoth, Jama’s husband and fellow founder talks about his role in their upbringing.

“They are obviously not wild animals any more,” said Charles.

“Noah’s Ark is their home and they could not possibly be separated from each other.

“You just have to remember who you’re dealing with when you are with them though.

“It’s when you forget that these fellows are wild animals that you get yourself in trouble.”

According to DIane Smith, the trio’s new habitat cost an estimated £15,000 and had to be constructed carefully, in order to accommodate its occupants.

“The clubhouse had to be very sturdy for the guys, because they all sleep in it together,”

We had to include a creek, because the tiger and the bear both like to be in water.”

From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6750373/Tiger-lion-and-bear-form-unusual-friendship.html

The Luxury to Walk Away (A must read)

I am currently in the process of writing a review of Jodi Picoult’s Handle with Care. The theme revolved around a lawsuit deemed wrongful birth – that a child, in essence, should have never been born. I was rather intrigued about such a notion, so I googled wrongful birth to get a realistic perspective and this particular article in the New York Times caught my attention. What life should be deemed more or less worthy to live? Do we have that right to decide? Should we blame the system instead of the parents because the system has undeniably failed disabled people? Where should the line be drawn? Is loving a child really unconditional or does that just apply to able-bodied children?  To be honest, the reason why the subject shook me so much is because I have been born with a debilitating illness which has placed a heavy emotional, financial and physical burden on my mother. Would she have terminated the pregnancy during prenatal care had she known her daughter was going to face a lifetime of surgeries and disabilities? Would she have spared me, would I have wanted to be spared? It is often easy for any parent to say no after the child is born because, well, the parent has grown to love the child. But what if they hadn’t met the child yet, would that change the outcome? Would my very existence be in question?

Read the following article, I guarantee you won’t be able to turn away.

A Wrongful Birth?

By ELIZABETH WEIL

Published: March 12, 2006

Like most American women who give birth to a severely handicapped child, Donna Branca became pregnant with A.J. well before the age of 35. Had she been older, her doctors would almost certainly have recommended amniocentesis to screen for genetic disorders. But she was 31, so they did not, despite the fact that she had an unusual pregnancy. Branca bled during her first trimester, a possible indication of birth defects, and at her midterm sonogram, when she was 20 weeks pregnant, her fetus looked smaller than it should have based on when her doctors originally presumed she conceived. Branca had not gained much weight, either, but her doctors — whom she is barred from identifying, by a legal settlement — saw no cause for alarm. “Looking back now, of course, it’s easy to say I should have asked more questions or maybe been a little more concerned,” she told me last fall, sitting in her grassy backyard in Orangeburg, 20 miles north of Manhattan. Branca is a pretty woman, dark and compact, with a winning suburban New York accent. She glanced at A. J., a 6-year-old with a head of dark curls and the mental capacity of a 6-month-old. Her 3-year-old twins from a subsequent pregnancy ran around collecting acorns.

On April 22, 1999, when Branca was 28 weeks pregnant — four weeks past the legal window for terminating a pregnancy in New York — she saw her regular doctor (for what would be the last time) and was reassured that her baby was fine. But three weeks later, while on vacation on the Jersey Shore, Branca began to bleed again. Her husband, Anthony, drove her to the emergency room at Southern Ocean County Hospital in Manahawkin, N.J. Anthony Branca, like his wife, is compact and mild-mannered. When the obstetrician arrived, the doctor got out a tape and measured Donna’s belly, a standard procedure to gauge a fetus’s size. Although such measurements are a routine part of prenatal medicine and require only a few seconds, Donna had never had her belly measured. The obstetrician on duty that day asked Donna if she had had any prenatal care at all. Then he told her, based on his calculations, her fetus appeared to be only 24 weeks old, not 31.

An emergency sonogram confirmed that the fetus was indeed abnormally small, and an amniocentesis later performed at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, N.Y., revealed much worse news: Donna Branca’s fetus had both a gene duplication and a gene deletion on his fourth chromosome. (It was not until after birth that it would became clear that her baby had Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, which commonly includes mental retardation, physical disfigurement, inability to speak, seizures and respiratory and digestive problems.) After two weeks of bed rest, during which doctors tried to delay labor, Donna delivered A.J. Branca on June 11, 1999, about six weeks before her due date. He was 15 inches long and weighed two and a half pounds, and he didn’t cry when he came out. “One of the first things the attending doctor said to me,” Donna told me, “was, ‘It’s not hereditary, so you should just have another child right away.”‘

What happened next — the years in which the Brancas came to love A.J. deeply and also to file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit claiming that Donna Branca’s obstetrician’s poor care deprived her of the right to abort him — sheds an uncomfortable light on contemporary expectations about childbearing and on how much control we believe we should have over the babies we give birth to. The technology of prenatal care has been shifting rapidly: sonograms became standard in the 80’s; many new genetic tests became standard in the 90’s. Our ethical responses to the information provided has been shifting as well. As in many other realms, from marriage and its definition to end-of-life issues, those ethics and standards are being hashed out in the courts, in one lawsuit after another. And what those cases are exposing is the relatively new belief that we should have a right to choose which babies come into the world. This belief is built upon two assumptions, both of which have emerged in the past 40 years. The first is the assumption that if we choose to take advantage of contemporary technology, major flaws in our fetus’s health will be detected before birth. The second assumption, more controversial, is that we will be able to do something — namely, end the pregnancy — if those flaws suggest a parenting project we would rather not undertake.

The practice of terminating specific pregnancies, as opposed to aborting pregnancies so as not to have a child at all, is seldom discussed in its baldest terms. It is also poised to rise. Just this past November, scientists at Columbia University published a major paper in The New England Journal of Medicine on the effectiveness of new, noninvasive techniques for screening for Down syndrome in the first trimester, when the decision to terminate will most likely be more common and, some argue, more humane. In in vitro settings, a new technology called P.G.D. — preimplantation genetic diagnosis — allows doctors to test for genetic defects days after fertilizing an egg in a petri dish. Perhaps most important, the number of prenatal genetic tests is increasing exponentially — it jumped from 100 to 1,000 between 1993 and 2003 — and no regulations yet guide parents and doctors about fair reasons for terminating or going forward with particular births. Should it be O.K. to terminate a deaf child? What about a blind one? How mentally retarded is too mentally retarded? What if the child will develop a serious disease, like Huntington’s, later in life? According to one reproductive legal scholar, Susan Crockin in Newton, Mass., “As reproductive genetics opens up new possibilities, we should expect to see more of these cases, and we should expect to see more novel issues.”

At present, courts in about half the states recognize wrongful birth as a subset of medical negligence or allow lawsuits under the more general malpractice umbrella if a doctor’s poor care leads to the delivery of a child the parents claim they would have chosen to terminate in utero had they known in time of its impaired health. In some of these states, like New York, where the Brancas’ case was tried, emotional damages — compensation for the distress incurred by having an impaired child — cannot be recovered. No matter the legal context, terminating a wanted pregnancy is no one’s first choice, but for the time being at least, when faced with a fetus that will become a severely handicapped child, all the choices are bad. At this moment, we are fairly adept at finding chromosomal flaws and horribly inept at fixing them. There is no chemical or surgical remedy if you find out your child-to-be has cystic fibrosis, fragile X, Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs, anencephaly — the list goes on and on. As Leon Kass, former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, has noted, in prenatal cases, often the only way to cure the illness is to prevent the patient.

he first significant wrongful-birth lawsuit involving a disabled child, Gleitman v. Cosgrove, reached the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1966. One plaintiff was the child’s mother, who had contracted rubella early in her pregnancy in 1959. Worried, she consulted her doctor and was assured that her unborn baby would be fine, despite the common understanding that rubella early in pregnancy can lead to birth defects. The baby in question was born with “substantial defects. . .in sight, hearing and speech.” Interestingly, the court recognized the physicians’ failure as well as the parents’ anguish and attendant financial burdens although it still decided in favor of the defendants, in part, it seems, because it did not want to enter the ethical thicket inherent in finding for the parents. “A court cannot say what defects should prevent an embryo from being allowed life.. . .” the opinion reads. “Examples of famous persons who have had great achievement despite physical defects come readily to mind, and many of us can think of examples close to home.. . .The sanctity of the single human life is the decisive factor in this suit in tort. Eugenic considerations are not controlling. We are not talking here about the breeding of prize cattle.”

By 1978, however, when the next significant wrongful-birth case was decided by a higher court, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had established a woman’s right to choose — that is, to terminate a pregnancy. The new case, Becker v. Schwartz, involved a geriatric mother (a medical term for a pregnant woman over 35) who was not advised by her doctor that her advanced age put her unborn child at greater risk for birth defects. Her child was born with Down syndrome, and shortly thereafter the mother sued. This time, the New York State Court of Appeals found in favor of the family, declaring it had the right to seek financial damages for the added cost of raising a child with a disability. The court, however, refused to allow the claim of emotional damages. It did recognize the family’s suffering, but reasoned it “may experience a love [for their child] that even an abnormality cannot fully dampen.”

This paradigm — awarding financial but not emotional damages — has become the standard in contemporary wrongful-birth lawsuits. Only a few states — including Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota, Michigan and Utah — have barred wrongful-birth cases through legislation or case law. (Conversely, wrongful-life lawsuits in which disabled children sue doctors for the suffering they are incurring by being alive have generally been rejected. These arguments come down to “better off dead,” and courts have claimed it is impossible to weigh suffering versus nonexistence.) Yet the ethical thicket that the first court feared is as thorny as ever. We may not want to give birth to disabled children, but at the same time we do not want to see ourselves as reproducing in a way that calls to mind prize cattle.

The moral quandary we find ourselves in pits the ideal of unconditional love of a child against the reality that most of us would prefer not to have that unconditional-love relationship with a certain subset of kids. “I think the reason that this topic is as loaded and painful as it is,” says Adrienne Asch, a professor of bioethics at Yeshiva University in New York, “is that prospective parents want to think that they are open to loving whomever comes into their families, and they don’t want to think that they aren’t.” Asch is one of this country’s most outspoken advocates for disability rights and against the “automatic assumption” that prenatal testing that reveals disability should lead to abortion. It is her observation, shared by many on both the left and right, that prenatal testing “is not a medical procedure to promote the health of the fetus. It is a procedure to give prospective parents information to decide whether or not to eliminate a possible future life.”

The reasons to oppose termination are both obvious and subtle and not necessarily tied to abortion views in general. (The question of abortion rests on a single issue: is it O.K. to destroy a potential life? Termination involves an infinite number of heartbreaking queries that boil down to this: what about this life in particular?) Some argue that our desire not to raise impaired children is based on prejudice. Others claim that a choosy attitude toward fetuses brings a consumerist attitude toward childbearing and undermines the moral stature of the family. Still others maintain that the act of terminating impaired children drags us into a moral abyss — or its opposite, that raising children with impairments increases our humanity.

I had to face these very questions in my own pregnancy two years ago. I was 23 weeks pregnant with our second child when my husband and I were told that our unborn son had contracted cytyomegalovirius, or CMV, a virus that if contracted by the mother for the first time while she is pregnant and is passed along to her fetus can lead to serious birth defects. Most likely our child would be deaf, blind and have serious mental retardation — a doctor friend told me that this prognosis could make a child with Down look like a walk in the park — but no one could tell us for sure what our unborn son’s health would be like. What is more, no good studies existed because most of the women in the samples terminated before birth. The uncertainty was awful: weren’t we supposed to be given solid information on which to base a decision? In lieu of that, we were offered a sonogram riddled with anomalies, a 20-something genetics counselor and terrible odds. We tried to take solace in the fact that our older daughter had never picked up on the fact that there was a baby in her mother’s belly. We did what seemed right at the time: we aborted.

David Wasserman, a bioethicist at the University of Maryland, wrote a paper with Asch titled “Where Is the Sin in Synecdoche?” in which the two argue that prenatal testing is morally suspect because the system leads people to reduce fetuses to a single trait, their impairment. “Since time immemorial people have felt fear and aversion toward people with impairments, but these tests legitimize those fears,” Wasserman says. Parenthood, according to Wasserman, is and should remain a gamble.

Opposing this, of course, is the plain fact that a healthy newborn is the best outcome — what every parent wants. No reasonable person would choose sickness over health, and we seem to have the ability to choose. So how to proceed? Much hand wringing goes on about a sci-fi “Gattaca”-like future in which terminating kids with Down syndrome leads to selecting for only highly intelligent, physically powerful blue-eyed children. Yet in truth we are not at risk of creating a society of such supposedly perfect human beings any time soon. “There’s enough evil and caprice to always assure there will be disabilities,” says Laurie Zoloth, director of the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society at Northwestern University. “But could there be fewer? When people worry about curing too many things, I’m always glad that bioethics wasn’t around when people were thinking about infectious diseases or polio or yellow fever.”
The Brancas have little way of making sense of how Donna’s primary doctors failed to apprehend that her pregnancy was not going well except to assume that they saw too many patients, believed her baby would be fine because she was relatively young or jumped to conclusions about the Brancas’ ideas about abortion based on the gold cross that Anthony wore around his neck. Whatever the case, A.J.’s first days and weeks were a horrendous roller coaster. One of the earliest, hardest moments was when a doctor approached the Brancas with a D.N.R., or Do Not Resuscitate, order. They struggled with the choice, but decided to sign.

During A.J.’s first few months, he was hooked up to oxygen tubes to help him breath and to feeding tubes to help him eat, and he lived in an incubator to regulate his temperature. He remained hospitalized for 17 weeks. Donna spent every day by his bedside, usually returning home to eat a takeout dinner with Anthony and then driving back to the hospital again with her husband. During this time, the Brancas had to decide whether to institutionalize A.J. or raise him at home. Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome is so rare that virtually every doctor who counseled the Brancas could tell them no more than what the Brancas gleaned from a single study they found on the Internet. The Brancas were also cautioned that severely disabled children are often easiest on parents both emotionally and physically when they are infants, as all infants are wholly dependent on their parents.

When A.J. was discharged in October 1999, four months after his birth, he was still “medically fragile,” he needed round-the-clock care and he spent nearly as many calories trying to eat and regurgitating his food as he managed to keep down in his stomach. The Brancas feared that if they took A.J. home, he might not make it through his first year. With the encouragement of their families and A.J.’s doctors, the Brancas placed him at St. Margaret’s Center for Children in Albany.

“It was just awful,” Donna told me, tears streaming down her otherwise composed face as she recently described the experience of dropping him off years ago. “Anthony and I just sat in the car and cried for hours. I was a mother, and yet I didn’t feel like a mother. It didn’t seem natural. As a mother, you have this feeling: no matter what, you’re supposed to care for your child.”

Back home in Orangeburg, Anthony and Donna tried but failed to find solace in the Catholic Church. (Neither had been churchgoers before, though both were raised in religious families; both identify with Catholicism culturally but say that families at times need more leeway than the church allows on family-planning issues.) They also started hanging around their single friends because they couldn’t bear hearing about children. When A.J. was 5 months, Donna returned to work in marketing for I.B.M. part time because, she says, “I just needed to think about something else, or I was going to have a nervous breakdown.” Around this time, too, the Brancas started considering legal action. Anthony’s mother, a court stenographer, encouraged Donna to requisition her medical records, and when Donna showed them to Dennis Donnelly, a medical malpractice lawyer in New Jersey, he immediately took the case.

Donnelly cautioned the Brancas that her doctors probably wouldn’t settle — about 75 percent of medical malpractice cases are found in favor of the defendant — though he also told the Brancas that if they won, they should expect a settlement in the millions. For the trial, he prepared a video called “A Day in the Life of A.J.,” since Donna and Anthony did not want A.J. to take the stand. The trial started in June 2004 and lasted three weeks. By then, Anthony and Donna had 2-year-old twins. In court, Donnelly asked the Brancas’ doctors why they had never measured Donna’s fundal height, particularly in light of her low weight gain, why they had been unconcerned with her first-trimester bleeding (a possible indication of chromosomal damage) and why they had not done any follow-up testing after her 20-week sonogram suggested the fetus was small. He also showed the video in which the jurors could see A.J. hooked up to a feeding tube and taking endless meds.

The defense, for its part, tried to insinuate that Donna herself had declined to seek follow-up testing and that even if she had sought such testing, the results might not have arrived in time for her to abort. Furthermore, they argued that the Brancas would not have terminated. (Donnelly used the signed Do Not Resuscitate order to argue that the Brancas would, in fact, have terminated.) The doctors conceded that the falloff in Donna’s due dates should have raised a “red flag” and that a follow-up sonogram after her 20-week sonogram would have showed a further deterioration in fetal size and weight. Donna’s doctors also had little recollection of Donna as a patient, so they could speak only about their practice in general and of her case based on her records.

Separately, both Donna and Anthony told me that they believed they might not have sued had Donna’s doctors just called to apologize. “They never felt any remorse,” Donna said, “never called me after my son was born to say, ‘I’m sorry this happened.”‘

The jury deliberated for two hours and found the doctors guilty of medical negligence. Ultimately, all parties agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement — its exact amount is confidential — which remains in a trust for A.J.’s care.
Some people argue against the idea that we should have a right to terminate unwanted genetically flawed children on scientific, not moral, grounds. Bill Hurlbut, a Stanford professor and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, asserts that a lot of genetic testing is hyped. “Genes are not like Legos,” he says, mocking the idea that the results of an amniocentisis, often delivered to parents as a neat picture of 23 chromosome pairs, can tell you who a child will be. “Our genes mix with whole societies of molecular interactions, including our environment. It’s not just nature-nurture; it’s cycles of momentum that get going. A lot of very sophisticated people believe there is a straight line from a gene to an expressed trait, and that is just wrong. We’re going to regret we had this phrase, ‘It’s in our genetics.”‘

Serious questions have been raised by preimplantation genetic diagnosis. P.G.D. is available to families undergoing in vitro fertilization, and it works like this: an egg is fertilized and starts dividing. When the embryo reaches the eight-cell stage, a single cell is removed and tested for genetic abnormalities. If the cell’s DNA looks normal, the embryo is implanted in the mother. If the DNA does not, the embryo is frozen or tossed out. But it is not so simple. In 2005, a team from Reprogenetics in West Orange, N.J., continued growing 55 embryos that previously tested as abnormal and found that a surprising number of the cells, when tested later, were genetically normal. After a few more days, an average of 48 percent of the cells were normal. After 12 days, one embryo contained 76 percent normal cells. This raises some interesting questions: do embryos containing some genetically flawed cells tend to heal themselves? How do you know if the cells selected for P.G.D. are representative? Is basing termination decisions on genetic information as solid a footing as we have thought? If not, how can we conscience the decision to abort?

Susan Crockin, the legal scholar, says she believes that P.G.D., as well as other types of prepregnancy testing, like screening donor eggs and sperm for genetic disorders, will very likely be the causes of all sorts of new lawsuits. For instance, a sperm bank in California has already found itself facing a wrongful-conception lawsuit, brought by parents who argue that their genetically impaired child would not have been conceived at all had the donated sperm been vetted properly. Egg-donor programs may soon be in the same position.

An unintended and particularly disconcerting consequence of all these new reproductive lawsuits is that they may bias the medical establishment toward termination, and some argue that such a bias already exists. This is alarming for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that several studies have shown that the raising of children with impairments is on the whole a lot less difficult and a lot less different from raising so-called normal kids than we imagine it will be. “Families with severely impaired children do not differ significantly in stresses and burdens from families with normal children,” Wasserman, the bioethicist, maintains, citing articles like “The Experience of Disability in Families: A Synthesis of Research and Parent Narratives.” The idea that a handicapped child will destroy a marriage is exaggerated, he told me: “A child prodigy can have just as large an impact on a family as a child with cystic fibrosis or Down.”

The ways in which genetic counseling is biased toward termination are both systemic and subtle. Research suggests that counselors may steer patients toward, as one counselor said to me, “starting again with a clean slate.” As another expert, Barbara Biesecker, director of the genetic-counseling training program at Johns Hopkins University, explains, “There’s kind of a trend out there to call people at home and then just refer them back to the hospital” — meaning that the family who has learned that a fetus has a genetic disease is quickly referred to someone who will help get rid of it. This, according to Biesecker, is “a cop-out.” Delivering the news on the phone, often without a spouse present, is, she says, “filled with assumptions about what’s right for people — it assumes that they’ll act,” meaning terminate. “When I ask counselors why they’re doing so much work on the phone, they say, ‘That’s what people want.’ But people are in crisis; they need to slow down. I believe we’re capable of making good decisions for ourselves in hard circumstances, but I think we should be putting up roadblocks to quick answers. I don’t think it should be easy.”

Compounding the problem, most of the news that genetic counselors provide to prospective parents about disabilities is negative and clinical. Face-to-face meetings, which often occur before amniocentesis, tend to be filled with mini-science lectures about how chromosomes replicate or how trisomies occur, not the swirling emotions that surround the news that the baby in your belly may not be the baby you dreamed of having. In an attempt to rectify the situation, Senators Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, and Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, last March sponsored the Prenatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act, a bill designed to mandate that more positive information be given to parents about the life of a disabled child. At a news conference to announce the bill was Brian Skotko, a Harvard Medical School student. Skotko published a paper in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology last spring based on his study, the largest and most comprehensive on prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome. It showed that obstetricians and genetic counselors failed to give expectant mothers who received a prenatal diagnosis of Down encouraging data about raising a Down child. One mother in Skotko’s study reported that her genetic counselor “showed a really pitiful video first of people with Down syndrome who were very low tone and lethargic-looking and then proceeded to tell us that our child would never be able to read, write or count change.”

Few would be against parents getting a complete and accurate picture of raising an impaired child, but how, exactly, does that picture look? Different families’ experiences with similar impairments are wildly disparate, and Skotko’s study has been criticized for having sample bias, because he collected his surveys through Down-syndrome family associations, groups presumably filled with people having relatively good experiences with the disease. (Skotko has a sister with Down.) Not included in his sample, for instance, was a 66-year-old woman named Wendolyn Markcrow of Buckinghamshire, England, who last year on Easter Monday gave her 36-year-old son, Patrick, 14 sleeping pills and suffocated him with a plastic bag and then attempted suicide. Patrick had Down syndrome, rarely slept at night and hit himself in the face so regularly and forcefully that he detached his retina. When arrested, Markcrow told the police that she had “snapped.”

hy does A.J. have to get on the bus?” Julia Branca, one of Donna and Anthony’s 3-year-old twins, paused to ask her mother, referring to the shuttle that was taking A.J. back to St. Margaret’s on a Sunday afternoon. (A.J. has since moved to the Center for Discovery, in Harris, N.Y., closer to the Brancas’ home.) The sun dappled the lawn through the tall oak trees. A.J., three years older than his siblings, but about the same size, played with a LeapFrog infant piano in his wheelchair in the shade.

Julia is extremely engaged with the world of disability. At “A.J.’s house,” what she used to call St. Margaret’s and now calls the Center for Discovery, she says hello to all the kids, whether they respond or not, while her brother Johnny hugs Donna’s leg. Julia ran off for a few minutes and returned with a cup full of acorns and set them on A.J.’s wheelchair tray. A.J. raised his head, as if to acknowledge Julia’s gift, then sank back into the looping riffs of his musical toy. Nobody knows how much A.J. comprehends. He turns his head toward his family, sometimes reaches out an arm. “One time,” says Anthony, “up in Albany, he started to cry when we left. He started to moan.”

In A.J.’s infancy, when his son visited home, Anthony slept in the same room with A.J., often in the same bed, dispensing food and meds at one- and two-hour intervals and making sure A.J., who weighed only nine pounds at 1 year, didn’t vomit and choke. When he found out Donna was pregnant with twins, he felt guilty because he “knew it was really going to take away from A.J. When the twins were born, it was like having triplets.” Now, thanks to the settlement, when A.J. is home, a nurse comes at night. In some ways, being A.J.’s parents has grown harder as he has grown older. Yet despite the direst predictions from some of his doctors, A.J. is progressing, if slowly. No one expects that A.J. will ever talk, but last summer he learned to belly crawl, and his father was intensely proud. “Everyone talks about when their child says his first word,” Anthony says. “With A.J., we don’t have that. But I think Donna and I have more satisfaction.” Anthony sounds calm but surprised, like a man long accustomed to unexpected and unsettling news. “A.J. was voted Most Improved Mobility last year at school,” he told me. “I was more proud of that. Every kid who has what he’s got doesn’t learn to belly crawl. I felt like he’d hit a home run in the Little League World Series.”

The Brancas love the son they wish they hadn’t had. My family continues to mourn the child we don’t regret terminating. “Anything you might say about the wrongfulness or the rightness of a birth,” Laurie Zoloth, the bioethicist, says, “the particularity of that choice is only, and always, experienced by a particular set of parents in a particular family with certain grandparents, certain aunts and uncles, in a certain religion on a certain block in a certain neighborhood. These are circumstances that as professionals, and certainly as bioethicists, it’s nearly impossible to fully understand. And then, of course, we have the luxury of walking away.”

 

Article from: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/magazine/312wrongful.1.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

 

Hell’s Island

“Hell’s Island” coined by TVsmith, so rightly describes the morbid mess in the neighboring island of Pulau Ketam. Although lots of us are not there, our ability to empathize knows no bounds. It breaks my heart to see all these pictures that he has taken.

You know I am more and more convinced everyday that the human species, contrary to popular belief, are far less superior to animals…My own two dogs show me that everyday…their ability to forgive, their ability to trust, their intelligence, their infinite capacity to love…No matter what we do to them, they are still loyal to us.. THAT, my friend,  is  evident enough to their superiority. How many of us carry the brunt of a grudge and in doing so, destroy our spirits entirely?

While I was reading TVsmith’s blog, I came across a quote by a renowned blogger, Antares: “The true measure of civilization is the way a community deals with social outcasts like immigrants (legal or otherwise), stray dogs, and the transgendered.” By this measure, “we remain classified an an Uncivilized Feudal State of Well-Dressed Primates.”

HA. How true indeed. I would say that 90% of Malaysians are apathetic morons who don’t give a (excuse my french) damn about the minorities of Malaysian society which include these poor, stray dogs.

As apathy is an attitude and a choice, I do not wish to remain the 90%.  I would jump at the opportunity to go to Hell’s Island but it is very unfortunate that my physical condition does not permit me to do so. So I decided to try and help in other ways, by buying kibble and shampoo, and donating them to Furry Friend’s Farm, a shelter for underprivileged stray dogs. TYL & I plan on going there this weekend (If only I could adopt a survivor but my two munchkins at home are driving my mommy crazy already!)

I would like to urge the Malaysian public to join forces and help these furry friends. It doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor, young or old, disabled or not. Our collective actions, little or big, can drastically change the perilous situation those poor souls are in.

Lastly, I would like to close this entry with a prayer:

“Dear Lord, please forgive us for our transgressions. We do not deserve Your forgiveness but we are asking for it anyway. Please open our hearts to compassion and love so that we may change the dire situation of these beautiful creatures. Teach us Lord, that it is through generosity and kindness that we make this world a better place, Amen.”

Luke 6:38 (ESV) Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”

2 Corinthians 9:6 (ESV) The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.

Matthew 6:21 (New International Version)

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Challenges Magazine

Challenges magazine is the only magazine in Malaysia that devotes itself to the struggles and triumphs faced by PWDS (people with disabilties).

And lucky for me, I got to be a contributor for the magazine and my first article has been printed in the latest issue….go to MPH and buy it pleaseeee! Or any other major bookstore!!

I am thinking about a writing proposal to the editor….i thought this topic  may be interesting to the readers of Challenges…. that is, Life as a Disabled College Student: Overcoming those challenges..hmm… or maybe I can write about how SEGi has treated its disabled students? hmm..I’ll think about it..

The Biology of Belief – Time Magazine

A very interesting article in this special edition of TIME, a worthy few minutes of your time.

“Most folks probably couldn’t locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it’s at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.

If you’ve ever prayed so hard that you’ve lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that’s your parietal lobe at work. If you’ve ever meditated so deeply that you’d swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that’s your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it’s your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect. (Read “Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs”.)

Needy creatures that we are, we put the brain’s spiritual centers to use all the time. We pray for peace; we meditate for serenity; we chant for wealth. We travel to Lourdes in search of a miracle; we go to Mecca to show our devotion; we eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to attain transcendent vision and gather in church basements to achieve its sober opposite. But there is nothing we pray — or chant or meditate — for more than health.

Health, by definition, is the sine qua non of everything else. If you’re dead, serenity is academic. So we convince ourselves that while our medicine is strong and our doctors are wise, our prayers may heal us too.

Here’s what’s surprising: a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don’t attend. People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. No less a killer than AIDS will back off at least a bit when it’s hit with a double-barreled blast of belief. “Even accounting for medications,” says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief, “spirituality predicts for better disease control.” (Read “Finding God on YouTube.”)

It’s hard not to be impressed by findings like that, but a skeptic will say there’s nothing remarkable — much less spiritual — about them. You live longer if you go to church because you’re there for the cholesterol-screening drive and the visiting-nurse service. Your viral load goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol — a stress hormone — go down first. “Science doesn’t deal in supernatural explanations,” says Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. “Religion and science address different concerns.”

That’s undeniably true — up to a point. But it’s also true that our brains and bodies contain an awful lot of spiritual wiring. Even if there’s a scientific explanation for every strand of it, that doesn’t mean we can’t put it to powerful use. And if one of those uses can make us well, shouldn’t we take advantage of it? “A large body of science shows a positive impact of religion on health,” says Dr. Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Penn’s Center for Spirituality and the Mind. “The way the brain works is so compatible with religion and spirituality that we’re going to be enmeshed in both for a long time.”

It’s All in Your Head
“enmeshed in the brain” is as good a way as any to describe Newberg’s work of the past 15 years. The author of four books, including the soon-to-be-released How God Changes Your Brain, he has looked more closely than most at how our spiritual data-processing center works, conducting various types of brain scans on more than 100 people, all of them in different kinds of worshipful or contemplative states. Over time, Newberg and his team have come to recognize just which parts of the brain light up during just which experiences.

When people engage in prayer, it’s the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings. The frontal lobes go quieter when worshippers are involved in the singular activity of speaking in tongues — which jibes nicely with the speakers’ subjective experience that they are not in control of what they’re saying.

Pray and meditate enough and some changes in the brain become permanent. Long-term meditators — those with 15 years of practice or more — appear to have thicker frontal lobes than nonmeditators. People who describe themselves as highly spiritual tend to exhibit an asymmetry in the thalamus — a feature that other people can develop after just eight weeks of training in meditation skills. “It may be that some people have fundamental asymmetry [in the thalamus] to begin with,” Newberg says, “and that leads them down this path, which changes the brain further.”

No matter what explains the shape of the brain, it can pay dividends. Better-functioning frontal lobes help boost memory. In one study, Newberg scanned the brains of people who complained of poor recall before they underwent meditation training, then scanned them again after. As the lobes bulked up, memory improved.

Faith and health overlap in other ways too. Take fasting. One of the staples of both traditional wellness protocols and traditional religious rituals is the cleansing fast, which is said to purge toxins in the first case and purge sins or serve other pious ends in the second. There are secular water fasts, tea fasts and grapefruit fasts, to say nothing of the lemon, maple-syrup and cayenne-pepper fast. Jews fast on Yom Kippur; Muslims observe Ramadan; Catholics have Lent; Hindus give up food on 18 major holidays. Done right, these fasts may lead to a state of clarity and even euphoria. This, in turn, can give practitioners the blissful sense that whether the goal of the food restriction is health or spiritual insight, it’s being achieved. Maybe it is, but there’s also chemical legerdemain at work. (See pictures of Pope Benedict XVI visiting America.)

The brain is a very energy-intensive organ, one that requires a lot of calories to keep running. When food intake is cut, the liver steps into the breach, producing glucose and sending it throughout the body — always making sure the brain gets a particularly generous helping. The liver’s reserve lasts only about 24 hours, after which, cells begin breaking down the body’s fats and proteins — essentially living off the land. As this happens, the composition of the blood — including hormones, neurotransmitters and metabolic by-products — changes. Throw this much loopy chemistry at a sensitive machine like the brain and it’s likely to go on the blink. “There are very real changes that occur in the body very rapidly that might explain the clarity during fasting,” says Dr. Catherine Gordon, an endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital in Boston. “The brain is in a different state even during a short-term fast.” Biologically, that’s not good, but the light-headed sense of peace, albeit brief, that comes with it reinforces the fast and rewards you for engaging in it all the same. (See pictures of the end of Ramadan.)

How Powerful Is Prayer?
For most believers, the element of religious life that intersects most naturally with health is prayer. Very serious theologians believe in the power of so-called intercessory prayer to heal the sick, and some very serious scientists have looked at it too, with more than 6,000 published studies on the topic just since 2000. Some of them have been funded by groups like the John Templeton Foundation — part of whose mission is to search for overlaps of religion and science — but others have come from more dispassionate investigators.

As long ago as 1872, Francis Galton, the man behind eugenics and fingerprinting, reckoned that monarchs should live longer than the rest of us, since millions of people pray for the health of their King or Queen every day. His research showed just the opposite — no surprise, perhaps, given the rich diet and extensive leisure that royal families enjoy. An oft discussed 1988 study by cardiologist Randolph Byrd of San Francisco General Hospital found that heart patients who were prayed for fared better than those who were not. But a larger study in 2005 by cardiologist Herbert Benson at Harvard University challenged that finding, reporting that complications occurred in 52% of heart-bypass patients who received intercessory prayer and 51% of those who didn’t. Sloan says even attempting to find a scientific basis for a link between prayer and healing is a “fool’s errand” — and for the most basic methodological reason. “It’s impossible to know how much prayer is received,” he says, “and since you don’t know that, you can’t determine dose.”

Such exactitude does not dissuade believers — not surprising, given the centrality of prayer to faith. But there is one thing on which both camps agree: when you’re setting up your study, it matters a great deal whether subjects know they’re being prayed for. Give them even a hint as to whether they’re in the prayer group or a control group and the famed placebo effect can blow your data to bits.

First described in the medical literature in the 1780s, the placebo effect can work all manner of curative magic against all manner of ills. Give a patient a sugar pill but call it an analgesic, and pain may actually go away. Parkinson’s disease patients who underwent a sham surgery that they were told would boost the low dopamine levels responsible for their symptoms actually experienced a dopamine bump. Newberg describes a cancer patient whose tumors shrank when he was given an experimental drug, grew back when he learned that the drug was ineffective in other patients and shrank again when his doctor administered sterile water but said it was a more powerful version of the medication. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ultimately declared the drug ineffective, and the patient died. All that may be necessary for the placebo effect to kick in is for one part of the brain to take in data from the world and hand that information off to another part that controls a particular bodily function. “The brain appears to be able to target the placebo effect in a variety of ways,” says Newberg. There’s no science proving that the intercessions of others will make you well. But it surely does no harm — and probably helps — to know that people are praying for you.

Faith and Longevity
If belief in a pill can be so powerful, belief in God and the teachings of religion — which touch devout people at a far more profound level than mere pharmacology — ought to be even more so. One way to test this is simply to study the health of regular churchgoers. Social demographer Robert Hummer of the University of Texas has been following a population of subjects since 1992, and his results are hard to argue with. Those who never attend religious services have twice the risk of dying over the next eight years as people who attend once a week. People who fall somewhere between no churchgoing and weekly churchgoing also fall somewhere between in terms of mortality.

A similar analysis by Daniel Hall, an Episcopal priest and a surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, found that church attendance accounts for two to three additional years of life. To be sure, he also found that exercise accounts for three to five extra years and statin therapy for 2.5 to 3.5. Still, joining a flock and living longer do appear to be linked. (Read “The Year in Medicine 2008: From A to Z.”)

Investigators haven’t teased out all the variables at work in this phenomenon, but Hummer, for one, says some of the factors are no surprise: “People embedded in religious communities are more likely to rely on one another for friendship, support, rides to doctor’s appointments.”

But even hard scientists concede that those things aren’t the whole story and that there’s a constellation of other variables that are far harder to measure. “Religious belief is not just a mind question but involves the commitment of one’s body as well,” says Ted Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “The sensory organs, tastes, smells, sounds, music, the architecture of religious buildings [are involved].” Just as the very act of coming into a hospital exposes a patient to sights and smells that are thought to prime the brain and body for healing, so may the act of walking into a house of worship.

Neal Krause, a sociologist and public-health expert at the University of Michigan, has tried to quantify some of those more amorphous variables in a longitudinal study of 1,500 people that he has been conducting since 1997. He has focused particularly on how regular churchgoers weather economic downturns as well as the stresses and health woes that go along with them. Not surprisingly, he has found that parishioners benefit when they receive social support from their church. But he has also found that those people who give help fare even better than those who receive it — a pillar of religious belief if ever there was one. He has also found that people who maintain a sense of gratitude for what’s going right in their lives have a reduced incidence of depression, which is itself a predictor of health. And in another study he conducted that was just accepted for publication, he found that people who believe their lives have meaning live longer than people who don’t. “That’s one of the purported reasons for religion,” Krause says. “The sign on the door says, ‘Come in here and you’ll find meaning.’”

African-American churches have been especially good at maximizing the connection between faith and health. Earlier in American history, churches were the only institutions American blacks had the freedom to establish and run themselves, and they thus became deeply embedded in the culture. “The black church is a different institution than the synagogue or mosque or even the white church,” says Ken Resnicow, a professor of health and behavior education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “It is the center of spiritual, community and political life.” (See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.)

Given the generally higher incidence of obesity, hypertension and other lifestyle ills among African Americans, the church is in a powerful position to do a lot of good. In the 1990s, Marci Campbell, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, helped launch a four-year trial called North Carolina Black Churches United for Better Health. The project signed up 50 churches with a goal of helping the 2,500 parishioners eat better, exercise more and generally improve their fitness. The measures taken included having pastors preach health in their sermons and getting churches to serve healthier foods at community events.

The program was so successful that it has been renamed the Body and Soul project and rolled out nationally — complete with literature, DVDs and cookbooks — in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society. To skeptics who conclude that the churches have played a secondary role in the success of the programs — as a mere venue for secular health counseling — Campbell points out that in her studies, the most effective pitches came not from the nutritionists but from the pulpit. “The body is a temple, and the connection was made between the physical body and religious and spiritual well-being,” she says.

Joining Hands
Many scientists and theologians who study these matters advocate a system in which both pastoral and medical care are offered as parts of a whole. If a woman given a diagnosis of breast cancer is already offered the services of an oncologist, a psychologist and a reconstructive surgeon, why shouldn’t her doctor discuss her religious needs with her and include a pastor in the mix if that would help?

While churches are growing increasingly willing to accept the assistance of health-care experts, doctors and hospitals have been slower to seek out the help of spiritual counselors. The fear has long been that patients aren’t interested in asking such spiritually intimate questions of their doctors, and the doctors, for their part, would be uncomfortable answering them. But this turns out not to be true. When psychologist Jean Kristeller of Indiana State University conducted a survey of oncologists, she found that a large proportion of them did feel it was appropriate to talk about spiritual issues with patients and to offer a referral if they weren’t equipped to address the questions themselves. They didn’t do so simply because they didn’t know how to raise the topic and feared that their patients would take offense, in any event. When patients were asked, they insisted that they’d welcome such a conversation but that their doctors had never initiated one. What both groups needed was someone to break the ice. (See pictures of Billy Graham, America’s Pastor.)

Kristeller, who had participated in earlier work exploring how physicians could help their patients quit smoking, recalled a short — five- to seven-minute — conversation that the leader of a study had devised to help doctors address the problem. The recommended dialogue conformed to what’s known as patient-centered care — a clinical way of saying doctors should ask questions then clam up and listen to the answers. In the case of smoking, they were advised merely to make their concern known to patients, then ask them if they’d ever tried to quit before. Depending on how that first question was received, they could ask when those earlier attempts had been made, whether the patients would be interested in trying again and, most important, if it was all right to follow up on the conversation in the future. “The more patient-centered the conversations were, the more impact they had,” Kristeller says.

The success of that approach led her to develop a similar guide for doctors who want to discuss religious questions with cancer patients. The approach has not yet been tested in any large-scale studies, but in the smaller surveys Kristeller has conducted, it has been a roaring success: up to 90% of the patients whose doctors approached them in this way were not offended by the overture, and 75% said it was very helpful. Within as little as three weeks, the people in that group reported reduced feelings of depression, an improved quality of life and a greater sense that their doctors cared about them.

Even doctors who aren’t familiar with Kristeller’s script are finding it easier to combine spiritual care and medical care. HealthCare Chaplaincy is an organization of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Zen Buddhist board-certified chaplains affiliated with more than a dozen hospitals and clinics in the New York City area. The group routinely provides pastoral care to patients as part of the total package of treatment. The chaplains, like doctors, have a caseload of patients they visit on their rounds, taking what amounts to a spiritual history and either offering counseling on their own or referring patients to others. The Rev. Walter Smith, president and CEO of the chaplaincy and an end-of-life specialist, sees what his group offers as a health-care product — one that is not limited to believers.

What patients need, he says, is a “person who can make a competent assessment and engage a patient’s spiritual person in the service of health. When people say, ‘I’m not sure you can help because I’m not very religious,’ the chaplains say, ‘That’s not a problem. Can I sit down and engage you in conversation?’”

Patients who say yes often find themselves exploring what they consider secular questions that touch on such primal matters of life and death, they might as well be spiritual ones. The chaplains can also refer patients to other care providers, such as social workers, psychologists and guided-imagery specialists. The point of all this isn’t so much what the modality is; it’s that the patient has a chance to find one that works. “People say you tell the truth to your doctor, your priest and your funeral director,” says Smith, “because these people matter at the end.” It’s that truth — or at least a path to it — that chaplains seek to provide.

Smith’s group is slowly going national, and even the most literal-minded scientists welcome the development. Says Sloan, the author of Blind Faith: “I think that a chaplain’s job is to explore the patient’s values and help the patient come to some decision. I think that’s absolutely right.”

Sloan’s view is catching on. Few people think of religion as an alternative to medicine. The frontline tools of an emergency room will always be splints and sutures, not prayers — and well-applied medicine along with smart prevention will always be the best ways to stay well. Still, if the U.S.’s expanding health-care emergency has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t afford to be choosy about where we look for answers. Doctors, patients and pastors battling disease already know that help comes in a whole lot of forms. It’s the result, not the source, that counts the most.

With reporting by Alice Park and Bryan Walsh / New York”

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