Surgical Strike on Social Suffering
posted by Frank Pasquale
The recent face transplant at the Cleveland Clinic raises some fascinating issues about the nature of personal identity and cutting edge medicine. A failing face transplant might create agonizing medical problems for the recipient, leading some to suggest that death-accelerating drugs should be available in that case. Current organ donation cards do not specify whether they authorize a face donation. The family of the face donor might find the transplant recipient’s new face uncannily like that of the relative they recently lost. Finally, there is the question of the cruelty of a society that made the transplant so pressing in the first place:
She “was called names and was humiliated,” Siemionow [the doctor who led the transplantation team] told reporters yesterday. . . . Eric Kodish, the Cleveland Clinic’s chief ethicist, added, “Human beings are inherently social creatures. A person who has sustained trauma or other devastation to the face is generally isolated and suffers tremendously.” He concluded: “The relief of suffering is at the core of medical ethics and provides abundant moral justification for this procedure.”
Yes, suffering cries out for relief. But when the suffering is social and the relief is surgical, where are we going? We’re drifting from a standard of necessity rooted in you to a standard—”socially crippled”—that’s dictated by others. And instead of changing them, we’re changing and endangering you. The Cleveland doctors say their patient consented freely. They asked her, for example, whether it was she or her family who wanted the transplant. But how free can your choice be when the reason you want it is to escape humiliation?
As Will Saletan concludes, “I feel for the Cleveland patient. I hope her new face ends her suffering. I just don’t want to end up killing her—and calling that her choice—because we made her life hell.”
As the cosmetic surgery boom abates in South Korea, it’s important to think of all the smaller ways in which competitive pressures and fear of lesser humiliations drive demand for these procedures. The greater the humiliation in store for the unattractive, the more this “luxury” becomes a necessity.
January 4, 2009 at 8:44 am
Posted in: Bioethics
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Responses (3)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - January 4, 2009 at 9:43 am
On the last statement, cf. this piece by Sandra Beth Doherty from the latest issue of Middle East Report: “Cosmetic Surgery and the Beauty Regime in Lebanon,” Vol. 39, No. 4 (Winter 2008): 28-31. Although several articles from this issue are available online, this one is not.
From her article we learn, for instance, that in addition to the demand created by Lebanese nationals, “price competition attracts foreign nationals as well, leading Beirut to be hailed as the ‘cosmetic enhancement capital’ of the Arab world.” In addition,
“In Lebanon, perhaps more than elsewhere in the Middle East, a willowy Euro-American female form–fair and straight hair, blue, green or hazel eyes, fair skin, petite nose–is presented on billboards and in the media [like the glossy Mondanité]. When the Lebanese woman viewing these images, over and over, reflects back on her own physical appearance, she may receive the message that her body is ‘unacceptable: too fat, too wrinkled, too old and too ethnic.’ Internalizing this message can lead women to embark on a rigorous course of self-surveillance, which may include going under the knife. Once these women are lauded for their newfound youth and beauty, their self-surveillance may become a policing of other women as pressure mounts to conform to a socially sanctioned aesthetic norm. [....]
But the intense social pressure on Lebanese women to have cosmetic surgery does not come exclusively–or even mainly–from family and friends. The beauty regime in Lebanon could not exist without the omnipresent images of the media. The transnational advertising campaigns featuring the Euro-American female form purvey an ideal of womanly beauty that, as for most Western women, would require surgical intervention to approximate. Meanwhile, with the face and bodies of pop divas gracing magazine covers and billboards, with television airing their video clips and live performances, Lebanese women are constantly consuming, by choice or not, depictions of Lebanese celebrity body as technologically modified, flawless and forever young.”
This helps fill out the meaning of economic and cultural post-colonialism!
Patrick S. O'Donnell - January 4, 2009 at 9:43 am
On the last statement, cf. this piece by Sandra Beth Doherty from the latest issue of Middle East Report: “Cosmetic Surgery and the Beauty Regime in Lebanon,” Vol. 39, No. 4 (Winter 2008): 28-31. Although several articles from this issue are available online, this one is not.
From her article we learn, for instance, that in addition to the demand created by Lebanese nationals, “price competition attracts foreign nationals as well, leading Beirut to be hailed as the ‘cosmetic enhancement capital’ of the Arab world.” In addition,
“In Lebanon, perhaps more than elsewhere in the Middle East, a willowy Euro-American female form–fair and straight hair, blue, green or hazel eyes, fair skin, petite nose–is presented on billboards and in the media [like the glossy Mondanité]. When the Lebanese woman viewing these images, over and over, reflects back on her own physical appearance, she may receive the message that her body is ‘unacceptable: too fat, too wrinkled, too old and too ethnic.’ Internalizing this message can lead women to embark on a rigorous course of self-surveillance, which may include going under the knife. Once these women are lauded for their newfound youth and beauty, their self-surveillance may become a policing of other women as pressure mounts to conform to a socially sanctioned aesthetic norm. [....]
But the intense social pressure on Lebanese women to have cosmetic surgery does not come exclusively–or even mainly–from family and friends. The beauty regime in Lebanon could not exist without the omnipresent images of the media. The transnational advertising campaigns featuring the Euro-American female form purvey an ideal of womanly beauty that, as for most Western women, would require surgical intervention to approximate. Meanwhile, with the face and bodies of pop divas gracing magazine covers and billboards, with television airing their video clips and live performances, Lebanese women are constantly consuming, by choice or not, depictions of Lebanese celebrity body as technologically modified, flawless and forever young.”
This helps fill out the meaning of economic and cultural post-colonialism!
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