Matt Lumpkin

Ethics of Life and Death

Dr. Erin Dufault-Hunter
March 19, 2009
"Welcome"
Alternative Project Reflection

On the day my wife's leg turned blue I was terrified. Her blood had clotted in her femoral

vein causing her right leg to swell to twice it's normal size. We were living in Indonesia and no

one could give us a straight answer on what was happening or what we should do. We flew to

Singapore and there we learned that she had a genetic pre-disposition to clotting (Factor V

Leiden) that made traditional forms of hormonal birth control extremely dangerous to her. We

were also informed that if she were to become pregnant then she would likely suffer another clot

putting her and the baby's life in great danger. Five months later, positive pregnancy test in

hand, we sat on the bed crying. We had already decided before that, were she to get pregnant we

would move back home. The next day we scrambled to find a blood thinning medicine to

replace the coumadin (which is the same chemical compound as rat poison) because, we were

told, it was likely to cause serious birth defects. One of our doctors suggested we consider

terminating the pregnancy. We were both 23 years old.

Two weeks later we had moved back to our home state of Arkansas and I began

searching for jobs that would offer medical benefits that did not exclude pre-existing conditions.

It took three months, but in the mean time we had begun seeing residents and med students at the

University hospital, paid for by state health insurance. Residents demanded we switch medicines

because they had never heard of the daily injections of a heparin drug called "Fraxiparine" I had

been giving my wife since we had stopped the coumadin. Yet none could explain why.

Different specialists painted vastly different pictures of risk and means of managing them. We

had come back to the US for better health-care only to find ourselves lost in a system that seemed
engineered to frustrate, oppress and neglect us. On top of the culture shock of re-entry, the

cognitive dissonance was bewildering.

Out of this experience came intense frustration, ambivalence, fear and a sense that my

wife and my baby's lives were in the cold grip of a pseudo-scientific medicine that was beyond

my control or influence and yet was the best hope we had at surviving. One afternoon I took all

of that and put it into the small rectangular piece at the center of this work. The syringes

surrounding the child are the hundreds of dollars of medicine wasted at the whim of the system.

Every day, medicine demanded that I stab towards my child, aiming for the tissue between my

wife's skin and hers, counter-intuitively, to keep them both safe. I embedded the image of the

child within a matrix of analysis and circuitry, representing the way I "science" intruding into my

family and robbing me of authority and control. That first work represented all the dread I felt

during that first pregnancy. It is dark and is rarely on display. People just don't want to see that.

This year began with news that a new baby was growing inside my wife's womb.

Though we were surprised at the speed with which we had a new life developing, it was not

unexpected news. Though we had held off on getting pregnant since my daughter had been born

(healthy, whole and happy) due to risk, fear and expense (the heparin drug, Lovenox, is still

necessary and costs about $15 per day), we had decided to try again. My initial response though

was to fall back into my old habits of fear and dread from the last pregnancy. Yet we are in a

very different place this time. Embedded within close relationships with our Fuller community

and our church community, we are not moving half-way around the world into uncertainty.

There is still risk and stress, but there is something powerfully transformative about the presence

of such community for us walking back into the experience of pregnancy. On a pragmatic level,

we have help with childcare when I need to run out to the pharmacy and buy medicine. But I

also have fellow fathers to talk to who are also thinking through what it will mean to add a baby

to the mix of school, work, church and family. We have a doula in our small-group at church
who helped us pick a doctor and hospital to deliver at. We have a sunday-school class to pray

for us when we're waiting to hear if the drug company will approve our application to receive the

meds at no cost and celebrate when we do. We had friends and family in Arkansas with the last

pregnancy. We did not have the kind of Christian community we have here and now. There is a

difference and it has transformed an experience of dread into one of hope.

I was struck by this basic theme that came over and over in our class this quarter.

Bioethics is principally concerned with individual autonomous agents making decisions in

accordance with principles. In the Christian story, the people of God living out God's story on

in our lives, we are never autonomous agents. We are one Body. The affects the way we make

decisions about life and it affects how we live, together, with the outcomes of those decisions.

This is what I hope to portray with my piece.

At the center you see the symbol of all my dread and fear, inverted. This is the way

Christian community and all things "gospel" reverse curses and transform death into life. This

symbol is set on a canvas of science-flavored marketing materials that ship with drug I still inject

daily into my wife while she's pregnant. The needles, the risk and danger, are still present. But

they are recast into a bigger picture, a larger canvas. Over the story of science, math, statistical

information and clinical trials, hands reach out to welcome, caress, claim and embrace this new

life. Holy Ghostly and transparent, they don't erase the underlying realities but they exist within

it and transfuse it with humanity made in the image of God. Thanks again for giving me a

chance to work this out, both in your class and in this piece.

I certify that I have spent 30.5 hours on this project. _____________________________