I’ve been reading the story of Savita Halapannavar, an Indian woman who died of blood poisoning in in an Irish hospital after doctors refused to remove the fetus she was miscarrying until its heart stopped beating, with growing horror. Galway Pro-Choice has the dreadful narrative of her death:

Savita was first admitted to the hospital on October 21st complaining of severe back pain. Her doctor initially told her that she would be fine, but she refused to go home. It became clear that her waters had broken, and she was having a miscarriage (spontaneous abortion). She was told that the foetus had no chance of survival, and it would all be over within a few hours.

However, her condition did not take its expected course, and the foetus remained inside her body. Although it was evident that it could not survive, a foetal heartbeat was detected. For this reason her repeated requests to remove the foetus were denied. By Tuesday it was clear that her condition was deteriorating. She had developed a fever, and collapsed when attempting to walk. The cervix had now been fully open for nearly 72 hours, creating a danger of infection comparable to an untreated open head wound. She developed septicaemia.

Despite this, the foetus was not removed until Wednesday afternoon, after the foetal heartbeat had stopped. Immediately after the procedure she was taken to the high dependency unit. Her condition never improved. She died at 1.09am on Sunday the 28th of October. Had the foetus been removed when it became clear that it could not survive, her cervix would have been closed and her chance of infection dramatically reduced. Leaving a woman’s cervix open constitutes a clear risk to her life. What is unclear is how doctors are expected to act in this situation.

The thought of a woman sucuumbing infection because the child that she wanted, and which she was miscarrying, wouldn’t finish dying quickly enough for doctors to decide that they could intervene to save her, is horrific enough. It’s even worse knowing that her husband, Praveen told the Irish Times: “We had heard Ireland was a good place to have a baby.” But, though it’s taken me a few days to think it through, there’s something particularly awful about reading this story the same week millions of women around the world will go see Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 2.

When we last saw Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, Bella was suffering from a pregnancy that was killing her. Her fetus was starving her of nutrition and giving her pregnancy cravings for blood. Despite the extreme danger to her life, Bella insisted on keeping her baby. And ultimately, her child snapped her spine in one of the few genuinely horrifying scenes in this vampire story and had to be removed by emergency—and bloody—Caesarean section. But instead of dying, Bella was transformed into a vampire. Bella was more beautiful, stronger, more sexual than she’d ever been as a human. Her disregard for her own life earns her a vastly improved version of it.

Millions of people will get that message in a movie theater this weekend. But what they should really know is that callous disregard for a woman’s life doesn’t transform her into a higher being, even if both she and her baby survive hardship. Instead, it can leave her in delivery for three days. It can lead to doctors who ignore a woman’s wishes, endangering both her own life and her future opportunity to bring more viable life into the world. It leads to a dreadful answer to a nightmarish question—as Katha Pollitt put it, “Who is more valuable, a living woman or a dying fetus? The Catholic Church has given its answer, and Savita Halapannavar is dead.” It leads to an arithmetic where the value women’s lives and women’s decisions is degraded even when there isn’t a choice between her life and her child’s. I can’t bear to cheer Bella Swan’s transformation when Savita Halapannavar has been sacrificed.

The bridge is yours.

-Star Wars business cards.

-This book sounds both fascinating and terrifying!

-How to get a Hollywood greenlight.

-Emily Yoshida takes on Rihanna.

-House of Cards looks handsome, but still totally and utterly unnecessary, and not particularly a natural transition to American politics:

The good people at The Daily Beast were kind enough to ask me to do some thinking about Scandal, a show I first though I would love, then got irritated by, and now am slowly becoming addicted to again, in the context of the election and the Petraeus email kerfuffle. I appreciated the assignment, in part because it let me get to the bottom of my frustration with Shonda Rhimes’ portrait of a Washington fixer who ought to be a female power fantasy: as a whole, the show limits the role of women in Washington to their ability to destroy or support a powerful man. I explained:

When Olivia’s firm takes on clients, they are often women with that same ability to destroy the reputations of powerful men, or, as Olivia puts it, “These girls, they come here thinking they’re going to change the world and then they get involved with some man.” She takes care of Amanda Tanner, a young woman who, like Olivia herself, has had an affair with President Grant, and believes herself pregnant by him. Her team helps steal the records of Sharon Marquette, an influential madam who is trying to keep her client list private. She represents a rapist against a victim who is attempting to make sure he goes to jail for an earlier attack on a dear friend. She helps get justice for a wild young woman murdered by an arrogant diplomat. Olivia and her team even reconcile the wife of a famous civil-rights leader and the mistress the man was having sex with when he died suddenly. Women may not run themselves into much trouble in Washington as Rhimes understands it. But they also remain off to the side much of the time, pulled into the great debates of the day when they have the capacity to humiliate the men who actually participate in them.

Even Olivia, for all that she has President Grant’s ear, does so because she’s both the source of his own potential bombshell—they became lovers on the campaign trail, and he continues to seek her out for late-night conversations, for stolen kisses in the Oval Office and country retreats—and of advice on how to handle sticky situations, to project power, even how to manage his own wife. And even there, Olivia is curiously removed from the actual debates of the day. Though there’s some suggestion that she and Grant have differing political views, the advice she offers him, and the influence she wields, is solely strategic. Like Dick Morris, the political animal in Olivia is a creature solely of the news cycle. She appears to hold no passionate perspectives on the issues, to be animated by no cause other than the call of her own gut and her undeniable attraction to Grant.

Women, believe it or not, have passions and authorities in Washington that don’t concern their intimate relationships with men, or that don’t even primarily address women’s issues. Part of the set up for the show means that Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), the show’s fixer protagonist, almost always has more official or implied power than whatever woman she’s dealing with, even though she has less formal power than almost all of the men. It’s be nice to see her have to help another woman who isn’t the mistress or the screw-up or the cause of disaster for a change, and give some crisis management assistance to a woman whose role in Washington has nothing to do with who she’s sleeping with, but has gotten herself in trouble the same way powerful men seem to, over and over again.

A number of people have passed along Sarah Mesle’s essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books which argues that our recent young adult novels have failed to serve boys particularly well. The essay’s occasioned a number of thoughtful responses, particularly Malinda Lo’s argument that Mesle’s peddling a rather suspicious idea of an essential and inherent masculinity that we ought to be seeking narrative support for. While I’m firmly in Lo’s camp in believing that the strength of young adult fiction is not that it can teach boys or girls a sole way to be men and women, but to offer multiple and affirming ways to shape those identities, I do think there’s something to be said for a question Mesle is asking about whether we’re serving boys well, whether in the way that she imagines, or the way Lo posits. Mesle writes:

The contemporary uncertainty towards young men snaps into focus when we compare recent texts to their literary ancestors — nineteenth-century novels for young readers. Hope Leslie, Jo’s Boys, Northwood, The Lamplighter: these novels heralded the end of boyhood as a happy ending, the beginning of a triumphant journey into a powerful manhood. But today’s YA boys approach their manhood with trepidation. And they should. The adult men who populate YA fictional worlds are often careless, corrupt, incompetent — sometimes even cruel — and only rarely kind.

I agree that boys and young men need good literary role models as much as girls and young women do, and that in our conversations about how to create great female characters, we don’t often have corresponding discussions about how to serve boys with the same intelligence and complexity. Some of that is because there already exist a great many excellent stories about deeply textured young men—having your needs met first has its benefits. But I also wonder if some of what’s at stake here is not that we aren’t creating great stories that foreground the transition from boyhood into manhood. It’s that some of those stories exist, but they’re told through young women’s eyes and from young women’s perspectives that we haven’t yet trained boys to embrace and share.

In much of the classic young adult literature I read as a child, I learned to see myself as boys and men would see me. In The Giver, Lois Lowry’s story of a dystopia, I saw Fiona, a gentle a girl who was blind to the fact that her care for the elderly involved learning to euthanize the oldest among them, and whose ignorance was a source of great pain for Jonas, the novel’s main character. In The Outsiders, Ponyboy’s realization that Cherry Valance’s status as a Soc doesn’t define her as a person guided my interactions with some of the more popular girls who became my friends in middle school and high school. As an ambitious girl on a largely female policy debate team, I hoped my teammates would see me like Petra Arkanian, the only girl good enough to fight alongside Ender Wiggin in Orson Scott Card’s alien invasion novel Ender’s Game. And as an irrepressible nerd, I both hoped and feared that I would end up like Harry Potter‘s Hermoine Granger.

It’s not a bad thing to learn about yourself from how others see you, as long as that’s not the only opportunity you’re given to examine yourself. In fact, it’s one I think more boys should have. So often, male perspectives in these situations are treated like they’re a default norm, while books with female main characters are assumed to be for girls rather than aimed at and available to everyone.
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A lot of nerdy policy journalists, yours included, have written about the applicability of Game of Thrones to aiding our understanding of issues ranging from China’s ownership of U.S. debt to rape as a weapon of war, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time the franchise has been appropriated for a real-life political campaign. In this case, it’s the Institute for Justice, a libertarian litigation shop, using Game of Thrones to fight against food truck regulations in Chicago:

We here at ThinkProgress are big fans of food trucks (which have also been used to promote the franchise) and their continued efforts to enlighten the DC eating scene, where there have been similar rumblings about regulating them in favor of brick and mortar storefronts. Clearly, Game of Thrones is able to bring audiences together across demographics, and political lines, even if its characters can’t unite a kingdom worth a damn.