That’s this case. Googling Wernecke treatment brings up a plethora of news stories, most from papers requiring registration.
Here was a great example of what I was talking about. These people weren’t religious nut jobs, or, “HIV doesn’t cause AIDS,” nut jobs either. IIRC, this was a girl that had received cancer treatment prior for some sort of metastasized cancer. Basically, after a period it seemed as if the treatments had been successful, and a number of tests and scans didn’t pick up any sign of the cancer suggesting that she was cancer-free. However, her treating physicians thought that it would be prudent to continue the chemotherapy for a period after the cancer had become sub-clinical to prevent a recurrence. Both the girl and the parents disagreed with this idea. It’s not hard to see why: chemo is hell. Also, I recall that the prior studies tended to show that this, “better safe than sorry” chemo approach had a moderate to minor impact on recurrence rates.
There are arguments on both sides. The potential cost for not treating is a higher chance of recurrence from the cancer, the definite cost of treatment is the loss of quality of life or possibly even death from the chemotherapy itself for the girl. You could make an argument for either side from the available information, and yet the medical community decided that they were in a position to judge this case, went through the legal system, and forced this girl to undergo treatment.
As it wrapped up, even though she was forcibly given the chemotherapy, she suffered a cancer reoccurrence. Once it showed up on a CT scan, the parents and child both dropped their legal objections to the treatment.
What came out of all of this? On one side, you had a family forcibly broken apart by the legal system. It’s not as if this girl was avoiding all medical treatment and would have headed off to live in the woods, her reoccurrence of cancer likely would have been picked up quickly by medical diagnostics, and she would have resumed the cancer therapy once the family knew that it had returned. From a strictly medical standpoint, she was probably slightly better off because there was absolutely no delay in her treatment because she was already on it.
I still think that in this case the wishes of the parents and the girl herself (old enough to play a part in this decision making process) should have been respected in this case.
Let me play a different type of devil’s advocate. The lesser popular kind.
This woman is an idiot and a dangerous nut-job who clearly made another individual suffer, and we don’t really like these types in our society. Her daughter was carrying 50% of her DNA as well as 100% of her upbringing. As such, she had a very very high probability of becoming an undesirable individual herself. The situation is self-limiting.
However, if the state would’ve interfered, and the girl survived, there’s an increased probability of her children suffering at her hand. When does it end? We do not have the desire or the resources (nor is it really feasible) to see things to the end as a society. The infringement on individual freedoms that such interference would require (putting the daughter in foster care and registered with the state for firm control of her reproduction and behavior after she becomes an adult) is too big a sacrifice, so better to let the situation solve itself(and it did).
Feel free to tell me how I’m a heartless moron and how I shouldn’t reproduce myself because my children will be heartless morons, but this is the same as sending food to a starving village and doing nothing else - all you’re doing is allowing them to make more starving villagers. Better to do nothing at all.
I’ll just say that not all behavior is influenced by genetics. Certainly her offspring were more likely to be a Goat-Felching moron such as herself, but it certainly wasn’t definite.
How many definites do we ever get to deal with? I’m just saying that if we, as a society, let all Goat-Felching morons who want to kill their children actually do so, the number of Goat-Felching morons who want to kill their children will be reduced. This is a question of social goals, not any particular life. Does this mean that I believe in post-natal abortion? Perhaps, I really haven’t made up my mind on the subject yet.
My equally unpopular solution would be to sterilize people who are uncapable of properly raising children, instead of letting them pop out kids that are going to meet gruesome deaths.
Seems this is a better argument for terminating parental rights, not post-natal abortions. It’s highly unlikely this sort of behavior is dictated by genetics, and not upbringing. And upbringing can be overcome, so it would be better for society as a whole to remove children from these circumstances and place them into enviroments where they are not being raised by goat-felching morons, in the hopes that they will grow up to be something else. Of course, that brings up all sorts of other issues, not the least of which is wether we want to trust our government to be able to tell goat-felching morons from intelligent, responsible parents.
This is only valid under the assumption that we actually WANT more children as a society by default, a highly dubious assumption.
You seem to be on the fence about whether children dying unnecessarily is a good or a bad thing. Maybe you should avoid threads like this until you are willing to take a firm position on the matter.
I don’t think it’s a remotely dubious assumption: clearly, society as a whole as decided that more children is a Good Thing. You might disagree that that’s the best course as an individual, and I might even agree, but society has pretty clearly made up its mind on the issue.