Mother Says Book on Cancer Cell Research Is Too 'Pornographic' for Son's School
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A Tennessee woman is claiming that The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a biography of a black woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken without her consent and used for medical research (a book available in nearly every airport), is “pornographic.” Jackie Sims says her 15-year-old son shouldn’t have been assigned the book, and, for good measure, that it should be banned from her local school district.
Earlier this week, Sims told Knoxville’s WBIR-TV that Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot, shouldn’t have appeared on her son’s summer reading list, because it makes reference to the fact that women often have cervixes and even vaginas. From WBIR:
“I was shocked that there was so much graphic information in the book,” Sims said.
What Sims read appalled her, she said, citing a passage that describes infidelity and another that describes Lacks’ intimate discovery that she has a lump on her cervix.
“I consider the book pornographic,” she said, adding it’s the wording that bothers her most.
“It could be told in a different way,” she said. “There’s so many ways to say things without being that graphic in nature, and that’s the problem I have with this book.
One might argue that the truly appalling thing in the book is that neither Lacks nor her family ever gave consent for her cells to be used. Long after she died of cervical cancer in 1951, the entire medical establishment made both enormous scientific gains and enormous financial ones from her body.
It’s a knotty ethical dilemma, and one that most 10th grade students are probably well-prepared to consider. From a 2010 New York Times review of the book:
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