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…

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…