On a less serious note, there’s my favorite weekly soap opera popping up with something useful at exactly the right moment. Okay, so I watched last night’s episode online just now, and of course I have to talk about it. The situation with Izzie and her biological daughter is certainly an interesting potential plot for the show, but that’s obviously not what I’m going to write about here. There are a lot of complicated issues here: first of all there’s the teenage mother thing, there’s the adoption thing, and then there’s the transplant thing. I’m going to try to dissect this but I can’t promise it will all be coherent or useful.
First, I’m kind of struggling with how to interpret Izzie’s teen pregnancy. I’m torn between being happy that the media is showing someone being a successful person, and even more so a successful surgeon, who had a teen pregnancy and carried it to term. We’re kind of surrounded by the idea that getting pregnant too young is a death sentence to the rest of your life or something… and it’s not. Obviously it’s not, there are people everywhere who persevere, and there are people everywhere who want a child “too young” and whose lives are fulfilled by that alone. I’m glad that there wasn’t too much judgement shown in the episode. At the same time, there wasn’t a lot of time or place for judgement and I’m wondering how it will all play out. Then I’m torn again because really Izzie, as we know, comes from a “trashy,” (don’t you hate to love that word?) by which we mean poor, background. She lived in a trailer park. So her teen pregnancy says something totally different than if, say, Meredith or Cristina had had one. It kind of reinforces the stereotype (and there IS a stereotype) that only poor girls get pregnant as teenagers, and only trashy, slutty poor girls at that. I mean, Izzie was an underwear model, she walked on the wild side, right? And we all know she’s hot- a clear sign of slutdom right there. But on the other hand it’s been awhile since we’ve seen Izzie as that kind of person. A long while. And maybe if we judge by where she is now instead of where she was then, it’s okay that she’s the representative Girl-Who-Made-A-Mistake. Sigh… I don’t really know what to do with that, I don’t know whether the producers/writers of the show were trying to confront stereotypes or play into them, or if they really just wanted a good story.
The adoption thing complicates things even more. Adoption has been getting more screentime lately, media wise, between Angelina Jolie and the recent spree of celebrity adoptions and the currently front-and-center abortion debate where pro-lifers love to claim that we can all just happily carry our unwanted pregnancies to term and give the children up for adoption. So this was interesting… we see a birthmother who obviously is still struggling with her choice on some level, even if she doesn’t think about it often in her life now. When the situation was forced back on her notice, she clearly was upset (which, again, didn’t leave much time for judgement). Okay, so we see that giving up a child is hard. I hope we’ll hear more from Izzie about her choice and how she got into that situation, but I’m just not sure we will.
And finally, there’s the transplant thing, which raises all kinds of amazing questions about being a parent- just how much responsibility or obligation do parents have to their biological offspring? Obviously, Izzie Stevens was going to get tested as a potential donor- that’s completely in character (by the way, do you love how she told the adoptive parents that it didn’t have a good chance of working out and then suddenly, somehow, it did??). Obviously, almost any mother would. But what if she hadn’t wanted to. How much obligation does the idea of “motherhood”? I’m going to try to explore this idea of what makes a good mother and how much a mother “owes” to her children in reference to other sources over the next few weeks. We’ll see, again, how this arc plays out on Grey’s.
