Jolie ain’t just pretty.

I was 25 when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer—and so, at a time when most young women are more concerned with their breasts as a source of pleasure than anything else, I began to worry that mine would kill me someday. I had my baseline mammogram soon after my mother’s cancer surgery (there’s probably some irony there, but I’m not looking for it), and have had one faithfully every year since, which means that this year marked the twenty-fifth time I’ve had my breasts squeezed painfully between X-ray plates by a bored radiology technician. I get my mammograms done at Rosetta Radiology in New York, a wonderful facility that tries to put some dignity back into the practice. And it was there, last year, that a caring doctor reminded me once again that I really should be tested for BRCA1.

Cancer is almost a joke in my family. With us, it’s not so much a matter of if, but when. Among the relatives who’ve had cancers which convey a hereditary risk, I count my mother; my father; both grandmothers; my grandfather; my aunt; an uncle; the list goes on. As to other risks for breast cancer, I tick almost all the boxes (large-breasted; dense-breasted; early menstruation; no children; cystic; and so forth). Moreover, I am at least 50% Ashkenazi Jewish (and my mother always had suspicions about her grandfather which, if true, would convey to me a double whammy of genetic idiosyncrasy). Prudence and my Virgo nature, therefore, would suggest that I really should be tested to see whether I carry the gene that could determine, one day, whether I live or die. Yet I have resisted for more than ten years, since the test was made available on a wide basis. I just don’t want to know.

I was in the car yesterday when I heard that Angelina Jolie had made public her decision, following her discovery that she carries BRCA1, to have a prophylactic double mastectomy and breast reconstruction. Lest you are tempted to tag this as a publicity stunt, don’t be. The decision to undergo this procedure is an incredibly courageous, radically life-altering one, one that I am 100% sure Jolie did not make lightly, nor without the maximum of sleepless nights that must accrue to such a choice. Jolie writes, in her New York Times op-ed piece, that her mother died at 56 of breast cancer. My own mother was 55 when she got sick, and I will never forget having to answer the first thing she said when she was coming out of anesthesia after her radical mastectomy, which we had all hoped would be a lumpectomy: ‘They had to take it all, didn’t they?’

My mother’s question summed up just how important breasts are, and I make that statement without attaching any irony or humor to it. Our breasts serve as an integral part of our identity as women—sometimes as our entire identity, depending on who’s looking. They define us as different from our gender opposites and, seemingly without inconsistency, serve as sexual markers and as nurturers of our children. On the other side of the equation, they foster inequality and single us out for attention, not always of the positive kind. In Jolie’s case, they have contributed a great deal to her success, which grew initially not out of her talent (although that talent is not inconsiderable) but out of her image as a sex symbol. So it can’t have been an easy decision for her to decide to cut them off.

If I can’t imagine even deciding to get tested—if the courage so many people generously say I have fails me when I think about being told, as Jolie was, that I have an 87% chance of developing breast cancer—imagine the courage Jolie had to have to assimilate that information; discuss it with her partner (who, according to Jolie, was exceptionally supportive—and why not? He’s a good Missouri boy, born and raised just 40 miles from where my mother lived); make the choice; have the surgeries (yes, plural); and then choose to go public, knowing the firestorm of attention her op-ed would generate. And I’m guessing that Jolie herself doesn’t see that attention as some kind of karmic reward for good behavior. Google “Angelina Jolie breasts” today and you’ll get very different results than you would have two days ago. I am in awe of Jolie’s decision to warn other women to take their own risks seriously by going public with one of the most private decisions a woman can possibly make—especially given her status, and her career.

Jolie says she made the decision so that her six children would not have to lose her at an early age. She also says that her choice, rather than making her feel ‘less of a woman,’ rendered her ‘empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.’ Fitting for a woman who was once called ‘the perfect mix of Bond girl and Bond.’ But I wonder how it feels to be Angelina Jolie today…what it’s like to know that from now on, every time you appear in public, people will be staring at you with a different set of assumptions: Knowing that your breasts are fake; comparing the breasts you have now with the breasts you used to have; wondering if the breasts you have now feel different to you, to others; having different (and possibly scarily unsettling) fantasies about you. Still, as Jolie so wisely writes, ‘Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.’ Although she was talking there about her choice to remove and reconstruct the two organs that, for a time, virtually defined her public identity, she might as well have been talking about the media blitz that has accrued to her decision to try to spare not only her children, but others, the loss of their mother. That motive—the impetus to save others from a heartbreak you know far too well—is the real triumph of Jolie’s article. That, and the reminder that even if you were born into a family in which you were expected to be the pretty little angel, your breasts do not have to define you. Why has Angelina Jolie suddenly become a superhero to me, and to so many others? Because, in a thousand words, she reminded us all that breasts, in the end, are just tissue.

Child catching.

I spend a lot of time behind the wheel these days, what with one appointment and another, and so yesterday afternoon found me in my car listening to Fresh Air. To be honest, talk radio is usually semi-background noise for me (I work with the radio on all day and often have to listen to things two or three times to make sure I didn’t miss something), but the interview Dave Davies was conducting with Kathryn Joyce was so riveting—and horrifying—that at one point I almost ran off the road. Joyce, a journalist whose last book (Quiverfull) explored the world of the movement whose anti-contraception philosophy is followed by the Duggars of 19 Kids and Counting, has exposed the fraudulent practices brought about by the recent entanglement of adoption with Christianity in The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption.

If you’re like me, you probably thought until this moment that the push to adopt kids, especially kids from foreign countries, was probably the least malevolent part of the conservative Christian agenda. True, there are plenty of needy kids right here at home, and then there’s the religion thing, but hey, nothing’s perfect, and to me, it’s more important to save a child first and ask questions about that child’s religious education later. I mean, what could be bad about bringing children who aren’t wanted and who have nowhere to go into a loving home? Plenty, according to Joyce—and, if the stories she told on Fresh Air are anything to go by, I agree. Imagine the following scenario, for example:

A loving and childless couple in New Mexico, he an Army career officer, she a homemaker, want to adopt an orphan, or a family of orphans. Via a Christian adoption agency, they see a video of three sisters, aged 5, 7, and 9 years, and fall in love (long distance; the girls are in Ethiopia). They are told that the girls’ mother died of HIV/AIDS, and that the father is dying, too, and that there is no money to take care of the girls, who are about to become destitute and may in fact have to turn to prostitution to survive. Their hearts open to these poor kids (no wonder; I was almost crying at this point in the story myself), and Mrs. Homemaker flies to Ethopia to meet the sisters. The only problem? The girls are actually 7, 11, and 13 years old; they’re not even remotely orphans (their father is alive and well); and they’re pretty far from the destitute status they were advertised as having (their father has a good government job and, by Ethopian standards, they’re actually middle class). The girls, however, are excited to be traveling to the US…because they’ve been told, essentially, that they’re being enrolled in an extended home stay program to get a good education, and that they’ll be going home to Ethiopia at some point when they’re older and their schooling is complete. So, all is vanity, nothing is fair, and everyone’s in the dark as to the real story.

You might think at this point that the story would unfold with Mrs. Homemaker returning to the US without the sisters. After all, there are, as we have discussed, plenty of children who are legitimately orphaned—both in our country and abroad—and surely the couple could satisfy their admirable need to be parents of disadvantaged kids without splitting up a perfectly good family. I would love to be able to report that that’s how things proceeded. But, as I said, I almost ran off the road during the story, and this is where it happened. Yep, that’s right: Those non-orphaned, non-destitute, non-family-less sisters traveled back to New Mexico (where they still live) with Mrs. Homemaker—who presumably perpetuated the fiction of the educational home stay in order to get the insta-family she had paid for. Making the adoption agency that handled the transaction—and presumably the individual who facilitated the selection of the sisters as suitable for farming out—a lot of money in the process. I love a little Christian capitalism in the afternoon, don’t you?

Leaving aside for the moment the big no-no of purchasing your offspring, what could possibly have motivated an ostensibly compassionate woman to believe that three kids with a devoted father and several aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends—three kids with lives and futures and identities of their own—would be better off traveling thousands of miles from their home to live with people they had never met in a country whose language and customs they had no understanding of? Here’s where I learned to hate the enmeshment of the Western concept of adoption (the relinquishment by one or more parties of their parental rights) and the commandment felt by conservative Christians to fulfill the Great Commission—i.e., to preach, proselytize, and convert. Apparently, according to Joyce, the impetus to save children from what admittedly are, sometimes, truly appalling conditions has led to a sort of ‘adoption theology.’ And, as Joyce says in Davies’ interview, ‘Implicit in that—key in that—is this idea that you are saving children twice: You are rescuing them physically from conditions you think they shouldn’t have to live in and also you are saving their soul.’

OK, so we’re back to the religion thing, which I thought didn’t bother me so much in connection with adoption, but which I now realize does. A lot. And now we’ve also got to contend with the really awful truth that people are being paid to lie about the status of children in order to make possible and render acceptable what in effect is legalized kidnapping. I don’t know about you, but I can’t see that as moral in any way whatsoever.

I’m sure The Child Catchers will be vilified by the conservative Christian movement, as was Quiverfull (ironically, the book was awarded the 2009 Vulgaria Child Catcher of the Year Award*). And I’m equally sure that won’t stop Kathryn Joyce from working to expose the other tenets of today’s brand of conservative Christianity that are equally icky. But I’m not sure how her work is going to help the thousands of kids who don’t understand why they can’t see their birth families anymore—not with so many members of the Christian community believing, as they so obviously do, that ‘saving’ children by any means necessary is the right thing to do. And certainly not with the momentum the Christian adoption movement has achieved. I can tell you one thing, though…I won’t be registering for next month’s Summit 9. I don’t want to listen to Michele Bachmann justify the tactics of this very special interest group as she ‘inspires, equips and connects for adoption, foster care and global orphan ministry.’ I just want to know how those poor kids from Ethiopia are going to get home.

*The Child Catcher was originally an evil character in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, written into the screenplay by Roald Dahl as a villain who transported children to Vulgaria to be killed.