I read this passage aloud to my wife, since it describes our kids’ live pretty well, particularly the lunchables part. Of course, in addition to lunchables and all day day care (and hefty doses of crap TV and videogames) OUR kids get adequate medical care … .
It’s revealed elsewhere in the article that she’s opposed to vaccination as well.
I really, really wish magical thinking would cease to be fashionable.
One of my favorite quotes, which always comes to mind with the “not believing in” vaccines crowd:
Philosophy is not physiology
Well, Guiny, if you had bothered to read my post, I think that it was rather clear that I’m not defending this mother. Here seems to be the salient part of my post:
I was responding to other posts that painted a broad swath over a number of other groups as all being nut-jobs that don’t care for their children. I was simply saying that, overwhelmingly, parents should still be trusted to make difficult decisions for their children.
This type of person scares me. I can understand wanting to do research if you have a disease, and particularly any drugs you are prescribed. If you chose to undertake a different course of treatment, that is your choice. If the alternative treatment doesn’t work, it may be too late for conventional treatments to do any good. This woman doesn’t believe HIV causes AIDS. Is her filmmaker husband now HIV positive? They met after she was diagnosed, according to Google-fu. Does she believe HIV positive people don’t need to practice safe sex? I wonder if she’s now considering having her older child tested, now that she’s allowed her daughter to die. Or is his “lunchable-free” life going to protect him, the way it protected her daughter?
Mind you, this is just her saying so.
Or, “You are entitled to your own opinions. You are NOT entitled to your own set of facts.”
I just did a prac in an infectious diseases hospital ward. If there’s anything it taught me, it’s that people like the woman in the OP are so common that if you want to pit all of them you’d better be prepared to start a few thousand pit theads. A few hundred thousand if you want to start involving third world countries.
Wanna hear about the woman who had 5 kids, all HIV positive?
(Bolding mine)
It makes sense, in a perverse and cynical sort of way.
If HIV drugs are deadly, there’s no need for South Africa’s government to spend money to try to distribute them. (There’s also no need to try to educate South African men out of their lethally sexist behavior and attitudes toward women.)
If HIV is caused by poverty, money other countries are spending to try to stem the tide of HIV in Africa–including South Africa–“should” be funnelled into the economy, instead. Huzzah! Money for economic development, no icky HIV+ people wandering around. It’s a win-win, I tells ya!
[Note dripping sarcasm. Mbeki should be taken out and (insert white noise to cover my possibly legally actionable description of what should be done to Mbeki here).]
Implied meaning:“Nope. I didn’t abuse or neglect my child. The spoiled little whelp decided to bail out on me.”
What an insufferable bitch.
According to Health Canada
So much for the whale blubber theory.
Silentgoldfish, while I was working at a company that sells wheelchairs, I learned about a doctor who had four kids with a genetic condition that has them all wheelchair bound. Apparently, he knew that his kids would all be born crippled, and had four anyway. The things people believe and do are just mind-boggling.
People who buy into one stupid conspriracy theory generally have no trouble purchasing other stupid conspriracy theories.
I had a roommate is college whose father was a prominent hematologist in Arizona. More than a few times he had to get a court order in order to give children of Jehovah’s Witnesses blood transfusions. The parents wouldn’t allow it because their church wouldn’t allow it. I suspect that many of them were silently relieved when the matter was out of their hands.
I started reading this article knowing that Duesberg’s name would crop up. I fully appreciate the fact that the spirit behind science is a healthy skeptism towards our current understanding of the hows and whys of things. But considering the mountain of evidence proving that HIV is a cause of AIDS, Duesberg’s contrarian views are just pure arrogance and ego. And now we have documented proof that those views have conspired to kill an innocent child. Duesberg deserves a world of hurt for this, too.
I remember reading that Jenna Elfman refused to sign autographs to raise money for AIDS research because… well… AIDS isn’t a disease, it’s a state of mind. Scientology for you. Why not believe it? SCIENCE is practically in the name!
It’s a shame too… she’s so hot…
Urgh.
America seems to be one of the few western countries where this could happen. Most other countries (Ireland and the UK included) allow the courts to act in the child’s best interest if the parents can’t. That includes when parents allow religious conviction (JWs) or personal beliefs (animal rights activists who won’t accept treatments tested on animals) to cloud their objective judgement.
I personally have met 2 women whose children have been forcibly put on anti-retroviral therapy under court order. Custody of the child is dependent on continuing to medicate them, and this is monitored closely.
While one cannot force a pregnant woman to take anti-retroviral drugs or undergo a c-section against her will (she has a right to bodily integrity that trumps any rights of the unborn child, even in Ireland), the treatment of her child once it is born is not considered to be something she has control of if she cannot act in the best interest of the child.
THAT’S what this is about.
This woman wasn’t putting the interest of her child first. Some parents who insist on continuing futile treatment do the same (Terri Schiavo’s, for example).
The decision isn’t always to treat, the decision is to do what is in the best interests of the child, and in this case someone should have been able to objectiviely state that this was not dying of AIDS at age 3.
To speak in threemae’s defense:
Yes, we can all agree that the woman in question is a rectal fuckbomb of the highest order, and that her child did not desrve death. Any dissent on that? I thought not.
However, it does raise the question of whether the state or the medical community can force treatment on a child contrary to the parents’ wishes. I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult to construct a number of realistic scenarios where a one-size-fits-all beaurocratically-mandated treatment would not be appropriate for a small subset of children. Suppose The Government™ wanted to forcibly give your child a treatment that you “knew” was going to be harmful to your child. Would you not want to exercise at least some control over what went into your child’s body? Do you automatically assume that The Government™ knows more than you do, and should be allowed to operate without any oversight?
Once again, not to defend the babbling moron mentioned in the OP, but the issue is not all that cut and dried.
I can’t remember any of the names of the people involved, but there was a case that came up very recently about a little girl (about 12 or so) whose parents were refusing to continue her cancer treatment, either because they believed it would be too harmful. The little girl didn’t want to continue either – to the point of pulling out her IV in the hospital. The state placed the child in a foster home; recently a court ruled that the child must continue treatment, even if they have to sedate her to keep her from pulling out the IV.
The news articles I found on this were rather one-sided though. Had the child been “brainwashed” by her parents? How bad is her cancer – have her parents, and possibly the child, decided that there is just too much suffering involved for a treatment that will never cure the disease? Or are the parents just nuts who don’t think chemotherapy does anything? In any case, it’s scary.
I view things like this as a necessary evil. I can think of situations where I’d keep any children I had FAR from the mainstream medical establishment, and I’d hate to have my hand forced by the government.
Bad decisions are an inevitable consequence of freedom.
Agreed. The question then becomes whether stupid parent choices become prosecutable. And if so, if this is the same as forcing treatment.
The Church of Christian Science is the same way. “You’re not sick, you only think you’re sick.” I remember reading somewhere “Christian Science is neither Christian nor science.”