Lolitas Medicine

[Zee Petty]

r\n\tLolita Chatterjee, MD is a board-certified primary care doctor at Mount Sinai Doctors, seeing patients Monday - Friday in Midtown. Trained in New Jersey and Connecticut, she is certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine and a fellow of the American College of Physicians. She was awarded her medical degree from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, now Rutgers Medical School, and completed her residency and internship in Internal Medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She has interest focusing in preventative care, cancer screenings ,hypertension , Diabetes, hypothyroidism, hyperlipidemia, obesity, osteoporosis, smoking cessations and other medical conditions in Internal medicine., as well as, routinely attending nationally recognized medical conferences and seminars.

Lolita Chatterjee, MD is a board-certified primary care doctor at Mount Sinai Doctors, seeing patients Monday - Friday in Midtown. Trained in New Jersey and Connecticut, she is certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine and a fellow of the American College of Physicians. She was awarded her medical degree from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, now Rutgers Medical School, and completed her residency and internship in Internal Medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She has interest focusing in preventative care, cancer screenings ,hypertension , Diabetes, hypothyroidism, hyperlipidemia, obesity, osteoporosis, smoking cessations and other medical conditions in Internal medicine., as well as, routinely attending nationally recognized medical conferences and seminars.

In early 2009 the airwaves came alive with sensational stories about Nadya Suleman, the California mother who gave birth to octuplets conceived via assisted reproductive technology. Nadya Suleman and her octuplets are vehicles through which Americans express their anxiety about race, class and gender. Expressions of concern for the health of children, the mother's well-being, the future of reproductive medicine or the financial drain on taxpayers barely conceal deep impulses towards racism, sexism and classism. It is true that the public has had a longstanding fascination with multiple births and with large families. This is evidenced by a long history of media attention and film depictions of such families, both fictitious and real. However, there is a point at which fascination turns to disdain, and that occurs all too often when the parents of the children are revealed to be Other-outside of racial and class norms. This essay describes eight socio-legal anxieties that coalesce in response to Suleman's story: (1) race and racial hierarchies; (2) the contingency of white privilege; (3) the nature of white motherhood; (4) the role of doctors as agents of the state; (5) reproductive technology and class; (6) bodily perfection and class markers; (7) the bounds of the traditional family; and (8) geographical differences.

The bounds of tolerance strain and break when individual autonomy collides with majoritarian notions of civic and moral virtue. Derision of Suleman reveals the limitations of tolerance for women who deviate from prescribed norms, including norms of "choice." Suleman's story is not just about multiple births, then, but about society's multiple anxieties when a woman breaches the bounds of racial, class and gender expectations.

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