A Bad Year For Catherines

I have no particular interest in the British royal family, but nevertheless I’ll be forever grateful to Princess Kate for telling the world about her cancer. It was probably not easy, nor likely her preference, to be so public at such a difficult moment. But whether she knows it or not, by sharing her story she made it much easier for other cancer patients to face their own moments. I know it did because her announcement came right around the time that I received my own cancer diagnosis, and her candor made it much easier for me to deal with my own situation. If nothing else it helped me find the words to tell people what was going on (“So it turns out I have a Kate Middleton problem…”). But it also helped immeasurably to know right off the bat that I wasn’t alone.

Which is a big reason why I am choosing to talk about what I’ve gone through publicly, to pay it forward so that others suddenly finding themselves in our shoes can also know that they aren’t alone either. But I’m also talking about it here, at Techdirt, and now, because so much of my situation is directly related to what we talk about here, and the constitutional crossroads the country finds itself at.

Not everything about my situation is salient to what we normally discuss here, of course. As I’ve been dealing with my disease I’ve come to have many things to say about the practical realities of getting treatment as a patient in America. But Techdirt isn’t (generally) a healthcare policy blog, and (at least up to now) I’ve not been a healthcare policy advocate, so what I may have to say along those lines will be saved for another day and likely another venue.

But what we do talk about here at Techdirt are issues like personal liberty and innovation, all of which are directly relevant to my situation. Especially given my type of cancer: ovarian. Having a gynecological cancer means that the way personal liberty and innovation have already been assaulted, and remain at risk to be further assaulted, puts my own ability to survive equally under fire. So although Techdirt is also not (specifically) a reproductive freedom blog, and I’m not (specifically) a reproductive freedom advocate, there is no daylight between those issues and the ones we do talk about. While we sometimes speak of them in the abstract, here they directly affect me and my life, and whether I’ll be able to keep it.

Not just because I found the cancer as a result of trying to prepare for IVF, which is itself becoming illegal. While my cancer would have been found at some point eventually, and maybe not too long after it was, ovarian cancer is virulent – my survival chances hinged on discovery being as quick as it was. Had IVF not been something I was free to pursue, and access to the healthcare professionals I needed to pursue it something I had access to, it might not have been discovered until it was too late. But the freedom I needed to make my own reproductive decisions, and the freedom the professionals needed to help me with them, is now under fire, and in some parts of the country already lost. And with it lives too.

But more than that, the very science of my life is being threatened. The loss of reproductive freedom, and the punitive consequences for any caregiver engaged in it, is leading to a loss of the expertise needed to address gynecological illnesses. My health depends on practitioners expert in how these anatomical parts work. But when applying that knowledge can be construed a crime few will master it. And all that knowledge, hard-won over the years, will be wasted. For centuries and millennia, and even recent decades, women simply ended up dying when some part of their reproductive system had an issue. We just didn’t know how to treat it. But now we do. Yet now we can’t. The loss of reproductive freedom is a loss of so much more than “just” that freedom; it is an abandonment of the science we need to survive, not just our pregnancies but any reproductive infirmity. Losing it does not end abortion; it just means that the only thing being aborted now is women’s futures.

And it’s not just my life and the life of other women being threatened, but everyone’s. The attack on reproductive science is an attack on the freedom to pursue medical science at all. The human body is a tricky machine, and it is amazing that we have accrued any of the understanding that we have about how bodies work. But there is still so much to learn if all humans are going to be able to survive and thrive, and what we are seeing with the criminalization of reproductive medicine is the slamming of the door on any further innovation and understanding, not just for reproductive care but inevitably all care. If the government can force experts to surrender what we have already learned about how to keep patients alive, by now prohibiting that care, it will undermine not just reproductive science but all healthcare science.

For me that science so far means that I can live on. I responded well to treatment and appear to now be cancer free. But ovarian cancer is a cancer that likes to rear its ugly, recurrent head, and if it does I’ll need more science to help me fight it. Just like every cancer patient does with theirs, and anyone else facing any other infirmity does as well.

And the treatment was not without its trauma, as it necessitated losing the organs I needed for pregnancy, organs which, as this episode began, I was hoping to use. But it has actually occurred to me that there is a bitter “upside,” which is that now, if something is growing inside me that could kill me, I won’t have to worry about some states barring me from dealing with it. Cancer may still kill me, but at least pregnancy won’t. Pregnancy, until extremely recently, used to be a survivable condition, even when it went wrong. Now it’s not. And even though on the one hand I grieve the loss of my fertility, on the other I still feel some palpable relief from the anxiety growing post-Dobbs that trying to carry a pregnancy could be the last thing I ever do. This relief of course came at the cost of my reproductive agency, but at least it wasn’t the government that took it away. It’s bad enough that fate can take away reproductive choices; no politician should be able to as well.