content notice: Kate Cox, Brittany Watts, genocide in Palestine
I think often about the soft threshold that exists between too soon and too late in our everyday lives. The emotional experience of now, or right now, or even right on time, can feel too sharp, too definitive to describe it. When we think about putting a timeliness on admitting love, balancing grief, appreciating friendship, or endeavoring gratitude, it is the soft threshold that is most tender. All are fluid rather than distinct, ongoing rather than singular time points. Too soon and too late admit there is the risk of loss either way, in not getting the timing just right. Generally we lean on doing something sooner rather than later, because we might miss out completely if the brevity of not soon enough is lost in a growing expanse of far too late. Intentionally adding a qualifier like too to describe soon and late shows the possible hurt done by either, as if choosing the timing of our action is rife with wrongdoing before we’ve either begun ahead of schedule or lapsed in our beginning at all. The dance between the two toos, toosoontoolate, is a tango of uncertainty, dizzying us into quietude, inaction, or misunderstanding our role in the timeline of things.
Who decides, who defines, who claims a thing’s soonness or lateness, and against what metric or intuition or prediction?
Kate Cox has been navigating this threshold, emotionally, physically, and logistically. Making decisions about a wanted pregnancy go far beyond the single time points of diagnosis or gestational age. Based on public reports, she and her care providers are navigating worsening clinical circumstances like leaking fluid and pain, risks to desired future fertility based on both this pregnancy and previous surgical histories, and threats to the dignity and vulnerability of a safe and respected pregnancy outcome. In her case, the state of Texas and its endless restrictions, politicizing, and threatening criminalizations want to claim things like too soon until it’s too late, purposefully weaponizing the facade of a subjective timeline against her bodily and decisional autonomy. Texas wants her to wait until someone’s (but whose exactly?) version of just before too late because every other timepoint is somehow too soon. When in reality we know that too late is the eventual outcome for her own health and safety, when what they always only ever mean is never, regardless of the harmful parading of terms like exceptions and plead your case-s and legal avenues. There’s only ever a too late to make a decision, ignoring how then it’s too late for her survival.
This, unfortunately, is nothing new. When morbidity changes to mortality is a clinical example of too late, but really we have to wonder how there could ever be a too soon when it comes to these real harms, because morbidity is too late, too. We’ve always known this, and the current discussion around a national 15 day abortion ban only provide more evidence to this toosoontoolate quagmire. When abortion is debated at the too soon moment of a positive pregnancy test, too late is irrelevant from the start. Clinical thresholds around perinatal hemodynamic instability, sepsis, organ failure, and cardiac arrest are politicized alongside nonsensical exceptions like rape, incest, and “risk of” death or welfare to the pregnant person. These coexist because their too soon thresholds do not exist and depend on too late for gestational age, and are tossed around like playing cards in the legal game of abortion rights that have everyday consequences for patients and providers. We are seeing this again with Brittany Watts, who is being criminalized for a miscarriage that was reported to the police department by her care team, as the lines between too soon to diagnose a fetal loss leads to misunderstandings about abortion and miscarriage and results in actions too late. My coauthors and I wrote about one case just like this, a too soon before it was already too late for a very real patient and their future futility. I hope you’ll read about her, because her story existed pre-Dobbs and so many more stories, like Kate Cox, will continue to become part of our public narrative and heartbreak. There is never a too late to speak up for abortion rights for all people for any reason. Please do.
In reviewing all of the ethics coursework I’ve completed over the last two years for my oral comprehensive examination a few weeks ago, I was reminded of the tender thresholds between and around and through too soon versus too late in end of life care. The weight on families and friends of not wanting to make the wrong choices for their loved ones is a pervasive bioethical topic precisely because of the emotional distress, the moral uncertainty, and the clinical grey space in the human-ness of the processes of death and life. This is perhaps felt most strongly in care work around organ donation, when the person who is actively dying chooses a particular type of death so that they can contribute to others’ lives in the space of soon-ness before it is too late for them or the recipients. In the instances that someone chooses to exist in their final moments in the liminality between soon and late only for the benefit of others is one of the most beautiful ethical scenarios I could possibly imagine. My own summary of a few authors in organ donation care is that every death process is unique, every loved one’s grief must be held carefully in that tender threshold of when, and that our capacities to care for those who are dying and those who are beside the dying need to be tended to. Some write that death is not necessarily a crisis for the patient but for the family, and that our work as carers should be to attend to both, perhaps even more so for the grieving who are still alive.
Too soon and too late echo in activism and grieving spaces related to the relentless and horrifying escalation of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Many speaking up for a ceasefire and a free Palestine also find themselves doing so against a backdrop of too soon. That was the primary response I heard when I posted on October 14th, that somehow there had not been enough time to support those grieving the violence against Israelis on October 7th and that speaking up for humanity before someone’s version of an “appropriate” response had occurred meant that my words came too soon. When I joined with other healthcare providers on October 17th, including the incredible work of Dr.s Rupa Marya and Heather Irobunda, in decrying the bombing of the first hospital as a war crime, somehow it was too soon to declare that Israel was the assailant, though now that hesitation clearly rings too late as healthcare services become completely demolished while people recovering and sheltering at hospitals are bulldozed into the ground. Some thought it too soon that queer people speak up for Palestine, believing that we needed to be informed that our queerness would lead to violence in Palestine and we’d spoken too soon, not realizing that queer liberation is tied up with liberation for all and that pinkwashing will not dissuade that vision. Still others appeal to my work in sexual assault and my own identity as a survivor, calling attention singularly to the alleged violences of October 7th, not realizing that survivor knowledge is one that seeks to end this violence for all, positioned especially within recognizing that rape as a weapon of war and gender-based violence are especially familiar to colonizing and occupying forces and are woven into the narrative of Palestinian existence. Every person who dies in Palestine matters.
If you can have sympathy for dead Palestinians, then why can’t you have sympathy for Palestinians resisting their deaths? @nuggets_on_a_roof
It has never been too soon to fight for Palestinian humanity, but every day it grows too late. Please speak up.
It’s never too late, until that place and those people don’t exist anymore. So it’s never too late until then. Then it’s too late. So speak up while you still can.” @nemahsis
Ceasefire now. Free Palestine. It’s not too late.
In solidarity,
Stephanie (Feminist Midwife)