If Sen. Jeff Sessions' 20 minutes with Sonia Sotomayor this afternoon is any indication, Republicans feel a new urgency in this second (and final) round of questioning. Before he began, Sessions' aides distributed 70-page packets of highlighted, tabbed documents regarding Sotomayor's tenure with the Puerto Rico Education and Legal Defense Fund. When his turn came, Sessions dispensed with the usual niceties about how well the nominee is holding up and jumped right in, accusing Sotomayor of promoting the idea that judges' "backgrounds, sympathies, and prejudices" should and do affect judicial decisions. When she tried to rebut that characterization of her comments (Sessions had dragged out the "wise Latina" remark yet again), Sessions tersely disagreed with her, then moved on to the Second Amendment without pause.

Yesterday, Sotomayor and the senators (Democrats and Republicans alike) couldn't apologize fast enough when they even appeared to be interrupting. Today, Sessions cut Sotomayor off several times, asking stoccato questions and blazing through the "wise Latina" remark, the Second Amendment, abortion, international law, and Sotomayor's role with PRELDF. And yet with just 100 minutes of Republican questioning left, Sotomayor is showing no susceptibility to the "meltdown" that Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said would be necessary to derail her confirmation.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 14

While I agree with Nina that the gesture of dying along with his terminally ill wife was insanely romantic, in my book, Sir Edward Downes was also insane. The expensive (Dignitas, the Zurich clinic that administered the deadly barbiturate cocktail charges about $6,570 each) and dramatic assisted suicide pact of the distinguished British orchestra conductor and his wife strikes me as, sorry to say, overkill.

My husband and I both work at home, and there are entire days we speak to nobody but each other. After reading the story this morning of the Downes' decision to die together, I told him that, though I love him dearly, he needn’t come with me when I cross into eternity. “Actually,” I joked, “I’ll need the quiet.”

In truth, I think it would be unusually cruel to our children to lose both parents on the same day. As Kerry points out, death is our universal prognosis, but each in our own time. Until then, when we lose a loved one, we are obligated to mourn, keep our dear ones in our hearts and memories, and soldier on. The Downes' son, Caractacus, and daughter, Boudicca, accompanied the older pair to their Swiss death beds, and though both were named for legendary warriors, presumably the two feel a deep human loss for their parents. I understand the shared devotion of the elderly couple, happily married for 54 years. But no matter how deep our love for one another, allegiance must be to the living.

Photograph of doctor by Getty Images.

Tags: euthanasia; assisted suicide

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 0

What’s amazing to me about this double assisted suicide story is that it’s never come up before. Assisted suicide, (like medical marijuana and abortion and a whole host of complicated moral dilemmas you allude to, Kerry) feels safe if we talk about it in purely “medical” terms. Cancer patient. The life of the mother. Terminal Illness. But we all understand that these decisions are made also, if not mostly, for complicated emotional reasons. Nina, your friends read the Ovid story at their wedding because death and marriage are ceremonially linked (Until death do us part). Think of Sati, the old Hindu practice of burning widows on the funeral pyre. A song running through my head is the old American Ballad “Barbara Allen” which Sean Wilentz wrote about in Rose & The Briar:

They buried her in the old churchyard
They buried him in the choir
And from his grave grew a red red rose
From her grave a green briar

They grew and grew to the steeple top
Till they could grow no higher
And there they twined in a true love's knot
Red rose around green briar

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: Downes assisted suicide

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 1

After The Wrestler, Nacho Libre, Rocky, When We Were Kings, and scores of other films about hand to hand combat, you would be forgiven for thinking there’s nothing that could go down in a ring you haven’t seen before. You would be wrong. Check out the awesome trailer for Mamachas Del Ring, a documentary about four indigenous Bolivian women who became national sensations when they began wrestling in their country’s main league, in petticoats and bowler hats, thank you very much.

Carmen Rosa, one of the wrestlers, is the star of the film, and though her moves are impressive (really, watch some of those flips), her dedication is even more so. After appearing on Peruvian television in 2006, she and her fellow female wrestlers were kicked out of the Bolivian league, despite being fan favorites and obviously, patently amazing. The four Mamachas decide to start their own league and organize their own shows (“We don’t want to be managed by a man, because he exploited us too much. We want to be independent.”), committing to running a fledgling business while keeping their day jobs (Rosa works as a street vendor) and taking care of their families. “Sometimes I love wrestling more than my family,” Rosa says, which makes her husband’s ultimatum, to choose between wrestling and her family, all the more heart wrenching. Seriously, forget Harry Potter and all the remaining summer blockbusters; this is the only movie I really need to see this season.

Photograph of Carmen Rosa in a 2005 wrestling match by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Tags: Mamachas del Ring, movies, wrestling

Emily, I think Reihan Salam is onto something in his recent piece on the end of male power, in which he notes that the recession’s disproportionate impact on men resonates in the world of politics, where women are gaining ground (at least in places like Iceland) in a backlash against male financial mismanagement. Salam is right that the recession provides one more lens through which to observe global power’s shift from men to women; he’s also right that the backlash against men can spark a sometimes-violent secondary backlash against women in places where they gain economic and political power.

Though few people talk about it, the emergence of prominent female leaders in developing countries can often be a catalyst for the hardening of traditional gender roles and increased violence against women. This has been the case in Liberia, though it has been almost entirely overshadowed by the triumph of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated economist and Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state. Accurate figures on violence against women are hard to come by in Liberia, but when I visited last fall, aid workers and some women suggested it was rising, in part because of male dissatisfaction with the perception that women are now running the show. Liberian women suffered acutely during the 14-year civil war, when as many as three out of four women are thought to have been victims of sexual violence. After the war, women voted in droves for Sirleaf, yet her ascendance has only heightened the contrast between her situation and that of ordinary Liberian women. “Men feel very threatened by what’s happening,” an aid worker with Merlin, a medical NGO that works in Liberia, told me. “You can hear it around the offices, you hear it on the street, you hear it on the radio ... they feel women are being pushed into a higher position than them.”

When the West looks at Liberia now, it sees a shining example of functioning postwar democracy led by a strong, educated woman. But Liberian women see something else. “The men are saying, ‘The women are up, so the women want to control the men,’” a Liberian woman friend explained to me. She attributed this perception, in part, to the breakdown of her five-year relationship with the man she had planned to marry, who became increasingly frustrated by his inability to find a job in a place where the unemployment rate hovers around 80 percent (and that was before the recession set in). My friend, who runs a shop in a busy market, jettisoned her boyfriend after he beat her so violently that her eyes swelled shut. This woman is no pushover. She was a guerrilla field commander during the war. Now, she keeps a framed picture of her swollen face a few days after the beating to remind her not to forgive the man who did it.

Salam warns that the transition from male to female dominance will be “wrenching, uneven and possibly very violent.” I think the greatest danger for well-meaning observers in the West is a version of what legal scholar Deborah Rhode has called “the no problem problem”—the false sense of equality that can result from the rise of a few extraordinary women. As we celebrate women in developing nations who attain power, we shouldn’t lose sight of the many others left vulnerable by these changes. Change always hurts; in the short term, this particular change may well hurt women the most.

Tags: economy, ellen johnson-sirleaf, foreign policy, gender roles, he-cession, liberia

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 2

Of all the stylistically tone-deaf things Sen. Lindsey Graham said to Sonia Sotomayor Tuesday, the worst was his declaration that he was going to tell a 55-year-old judge with 18 years of appellate experience how the world works. "I need to be sure that you understand the world as it really is," he said before launching into a lecture about how a comment analogous to her much-maligned "wise Latina" remark would have ended his career. Graham sounded truly aggrieved: "I just hope you will appreciate the world in which we live in, that you can say those things ... and still have a chance to get on the Supreme Court. Others could not remotely come close to that statement and survive. Does that make sense to you?"

Graham wasn't telling Sotomayor how the world works; he was telling her how his world works. But he conflated the two, making a statement about the standards set for his demographic-white males-out to be an assertion about the nature of the universe. Pretty rich, considering this hearing is supposed to be all about empathy.

Photograph of Lindsey Graham by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 6

Nina, I too was touched by the quiet, unassuming dignity of Edward Downes’ choice to die clutching the hand of his sick wife. It seems to matter very much to critics whether Downes himself were ill or not, which is interesting given the universal prognosis for 85-year-old men (and, indeed, all of us.) Is there really a significant ethical difference between his choice and that of his cancer-stricken wife? Maybe these are the kind of arbitrary distinctions that make a once-taboo process suddenly conceivable for a liberal, advanced society.

I find the most thoughtful objections to legalized euthanasia to be those that deal with the issues of obligation. There is the suggestion that women are culturally conditioned to avoid being burdensome, and few people are more burdensome than bedridden, terminally ill elderly parents and grandparents. Women might feel disproportionately obligated to end their lives. So too one could imagine the Downes’ decision becoming culturally obligatory for elderly couples; the measure of a loving relationship might be the choice to end it together.

These are the kinds of questions that crop up whenever a situation shifts from the realm of inevitability to that of responsibility. (What would happen if we allowed women to terminate their pregnancies? Adults to divorce? Daughters to live away from home?) And the easy way out—the refusal to wrangle with them by removing death from the process of decision-making—comes at the price of terrible suffering.

Photograph of a hearing on euthanasia in the European Union by Frank Fife/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: assisted suicide, edward downes

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 14

A sobering story from Europe: It's been announced that the British conductor Sir Edward Downes died last week, alongside his wife, at an assisted-suicide facility in Switzerland. Lady Downes was in the final stages of terminal cancer; Sir Edward was ailing ("almost blind and increasingly deaf," according to his son), but his condition wasn't fatal. He just wanted to die with his wife.

Of course, "just" probably isn't a fair word to use in this context; it minimizes the enormity of the decision—not to mention the profound commitment that these two people, married for over five decades, had to one another. But then again, in some ways it feels like precisely the right word: What could be more natural, more simple, than this decision?

I keep thinking of Baucis and Philemon, the elderly couple from Ovid's Metamorphoses who are granted a single wish by the gods. (The story was one of the readings at an old friend's wedding last month, and it's been skulking around in my brain ever since.) In Mary Zimmerman's stage adaptation, the two old folks whisper for a moment, and then Baucis says to Zeus: "Having spent all our lives together, we ask that you allow us to die at the same moment." Philemon adds, "I'd hate to see my wife's grave, or have her weep over mine."

At the end of their lives, the gods grant their wish (in fine Ovidian fashion) by turning them into a pair of trees:

Baucis saw Philomen put out leaves, and old Philemon saw Baucis put out leaves, and as the tops of the trees grew over their two faces, they exchanged words, while they still could, saying, in the same breath: “Farewell, O dear companion”, as, in the same breath, the bark covered them, concealing their mouths. The people of Bithynia still show the neighbouring trees, there, that sprang from their two bodies.

It's the simplicity and directness of this description (taken from another, contemporary prose translation) that's ultimately so affecting. And there's something of that bracing quality to the Times' newspaperly account of the Downes' final moments:

On Friday, the [Downes'] children said, they watched, weeping, as their parents drank “a small quantity of clear liquid” before lying down on adjacent beds, holding hands. “Within a couple of minutes they were asleep, and died within 10 minutes,” Caractacus Downes, the couple’s 41-year-old son, said in the interview after his return to Britain. “They wanted to be next to each other when they died.”

The son goes on to say, “It is a very civilized way to end your life, and I don’t understand why the legal position in this country [Britain] doesn’t allow it.”

I tend to agree, but what do you think? Should the right to assisted suicide—if you even support the notion in the first place—be extended to the longterm partners of the terminally ill? And if so, how strict do we need to be about defining "longterm"? Should the partner have to exhibit some level of illness as well? What about a lifelong friend? Just how slippery would this slope become?

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: assisted suicide, edward downes, joan downes, ovid

Emily, if you’re still collecting anecdotes from parents who are envious of their children, and children who outshine their folks, I can add to your list. My daughter, born when I was only 22, somehow absorbed the energy I thought was my own birthright and left me with a fraction to use by serving her. I didn’t mind. It was more satisfying to watch her run and twirl than have the ability to stay awake after her bedtime. Then, as my youth faded, my little girl became ever lovelier. I gave up my looking glass and only gazed at her happy face. Next, she became a professional woman and, sooner than I expected, exceeded my achievements.  Again, there was only applause from me. Now she is thinking she might have a child herself. A little girl, perhaps, in whose hair she will weave colored ribbons. Some small person my daughter can listen to and laugh over and cheer on—even the times that her child goes to bed sticky or wakes up cross. Someone that my daughter can trade her energy, youth, and ambition for, who will adore her mommy and smell deliciously like new adventures, soggy bathing suits and coco puffs. Now, I’m jealous.

Tags: parental envy, parenting