Danielle Levy

Swedish doctors have succeeded in transplanting a uterus from a mother to a daughter. The hope is to perfect the technique as one more way women who are infertile can be able to carry their own baby. The issue is said to have some relevance to eliminating the problems of surrogacy. It does however mean surgery for the donor and both surgery and a lifetime of anti rejection drugs for the recipient. And too it raises ethical questions the scientific community and the society are not prepared to answer. We live on a planet where population growth is a concern, since the projected population looks to be surpassing the planet’s resources. We may be saved by some as yet unforeseen technological advance, until then oughtn’t we to focus on birth control and going back to pushing zero population growth? As exciting as uterus transplants may be for those who may want one, it does make me wonder whether focusing on how to perfect them isn’t a misplaced priority.

There’s been a plan in Indonesia since 2008 called Jamkesmas which has covered health care for over 76 million poor Indonesians. Last fall the Indonesia parliament enacted a law providing health care for 240 million citizens as of January 2014. Part of that law also provides a system of death benefits, pensions and worker’s comp insurance to be in place by mid 2015. In the Philippines 85% of the people have health coverage provided by a government program called PhilHealth. In China a rural health insurance plan now covers 97.5% of the people. Its National Audit Office declared recently that its social security system was what it called “basically” in place. India has a kind of basic health coverage for 110 million, maybe not much given the country’s population, but as an article in the Economist magazine pointed out, more than twice the number of uninsured Americans. India also expanded its job guarantee program to every rural district, promising 100 days of minimum work per year to any household requesting it. The list of countries which are enacting health care coverage and creating social safety nets keeps increasing. While it is still an open question whether these programs will create huge debts or substantially diminish dire poverty, it is also true that these countries are courageous in doing something which the United States, the great and mighty power, is still ambivalent on and currently stridently arguing about. It does give one pause for thought.

A store specializing in western clothes in Ahmedabad, India, has called itself Hitler and is using a swastika as a logo, totally unaware that it would create an international furor. One of the owner’s grandfather was so strict he was nicknamed Hitler, and the store was named after him. In that part of India Hitler and the holocaust are seen through a different lens. Hitler was against the British and the British were the occupiers. During WWII many people in India did not know whom to root for. It is apparently not the first time the name Hitler is used in India, a few years ago a restaurant in Mumbai was forced to change its name after the Jewish community and Israel protested. But Ahmedabad is far more rural and the owners were not conscious of history. WWII was too long ago and too far away. What attracted me to this story which I read about in several newspapers from several countries was the fact that something like Hitler’s evil which in the West could be said to be a universal truth, is not seen as such everywhere. One can make a case for the culture and history of Ahmedabad and yet one still wonder how can it be in this age of Internet and cyber knowledge where anything can be demystified—maybe not completely but to a degree—by a click of a search engine? And then I read about why U.S. analysts could not see through what became the Iraq’s WMDS debacle. They looked at reports from the point of view of the United States, not Iraq. It hadn’t occurred to them to think through how the issue of WMDS looked through Saddam Hussein’s eyes. If American intelligence officers were blind to Saddam’s perception, somehow that lack of perspective helps us better understand—or at least explain—that of the Ahmedabad clothier.