My concern is that the state may define competency based on her choice.
Yep. She’s an adult. She might be a stupid adult, a crazy adult, an adult under the influence of drugs or psychosis or mental retardation or alien mind control rays. She gets to decide because she’s the one who has to live in the body that stuff is being done to.
It’s not like you can grab her and perform major surgery on her and then it’s as if it never happened. She’s coherent enough to testify in court.
What is the medical treatment FOR if not to improve people’s lives? Do we want to force people to stay alive living the lives we’ve decided are right for them?
When they’re mentally ill, incapable of making decisions because of that illness, and a danger to themselves, hell yes. Just as with children, mentally ill adults, especially those operating under delusions, shouldn’t be allowed to let themselves die without having someone care for them.
I find the idea that you’re OK with letting mentally ill people kill themselves, to be repugnant.
I feel that a competent adult should be free to make their own decisions about themselves, even if those decisions lead to their death. And it makes this an empty principle if society decides that anyone who makes a decision that could lead to their death is thereby incompetent.
The woman involved has stated she understands she has cancer, that the cancer she has is likely to kill her under normal circumstances, and that she is refusing the normal treatment. And she is refusing that treatment because she believes she will be or has been cured by supernatural means.
I may think she’s wrong and is probably going to die but she has the right to decide for herself.
Its not her choice but the justification for her choice. If you want to forgo surgery because you hate hospitals and would rather risk death, or don’t believe in modern medicine or whatever, no ones going to make you. Those reasons aren’t particularly rational, but they’re not really irreconciable with understanding the whats at stake and whats going on.
But if you say you don’t want to do it because the Archangel Gabriel talks to you in your head, and he says your cured, then there’s a good argument that your mentally ill to the point that you don’t understand whats going on.
IMO part of the problem is that the ability of doctors to predict the course of various diseases isn’t nearly as high as many people think and as doctors pretend it to be. Similarly, their ability to cure these illnesses is also not as high as they hold out either.
There are a lot of extremely serious diseases - including cancer - that will on rare occasions spontaneously go into remission. [Faith healers and other charlatans make big bucks off this phenomenon.] And just because such-and-such treatment is supposed to cure you doesn’t mean that it will.
In sum, there’s a non-zero chance that this woman will survive without the hysterectomy, and likely a pretty decent chance that she will die even with it. IMO, a person should get to decide for themselves how to deal with the odds.
Also FWIW, her deciding that God already cured her might not be as loony as people seem to assume. Effectively, she’s just deciding that she’s been cured, however she defines it. The fact that she attributes this to God is not a significant factor either way. Religious people attribute everything to God.
Of course, we don’t know the full facts of the case, so my comments are subject to that disclaimer.
So you are saying that The Pope is mentally ill?
Okay, I find the idea that we can forcibly sterilize people because we know what’s best for them pretty repugnant, too. She may have a terrible life, but it’s hers.
What if her mental problems (if she has them) are untreatable and incurable? She should never have the right to self-direction for the rest of her life because we don’t think she’s competent to make them? Haul her in for whatever surgeries or treatments because she doesn’t know better?
Again, what are the treatments FOR? Who are we actually helping?
That’s the impression I get. She’s reaching a conclusion people don’t like so we’re going to force her to have treatment she doesn’t want instead of dying. This in a system that denies care to people who want treatment.
Does he litereally hear voices in his head that he attributes to religious figures? If so then its certainly possible, but I don’t think thats the case. The Pope says he ‘talks to God’, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean that he hears a literal reply.
Religious delusions are real things. Visit any psychward in the country and you can find someone who thinks he Jesus, who hears devils and angels talking to him or who needs to stop the CIA from killing the Pope. They aren’t in some gray hazy area around normal religious belief, they’re very obviously behavior manifestations of something physically wrong with someones brain.
One of those things is empirically falsifiable.
Both are. One just takes a bit longer.
Spontaneous remissions of serious disease have been known to happen, and we don’t know why. “God” is, at this point, as good an explanation as any. If she woke up tomorrow and the cancer was indeed gone, as verified by competent medical testing, then her belief God cured her would be harmless and, as she no longer had cancer, not at odds with reality whether God was the cause or not.
However, if she is not cured but thinks she is that is a delusional thought pattern at odds with reality.
No, but he has one hell of a scam job running.
Look, I am happy to believe that there is a possibility that there is a christian diety, I don’t know for certain there isn’t but I am pretty damned sure that the words of his possible prophet have been so fucked with over the past 2000 years the pope may actually supposed to be screwing little boys. Not likely, but with all the writing and rewriting, and interpretation I am more inclined to go with a more protestant deal where each congregation is pretty much in charge of itself. I really think that the catholic church is so caught up in its own garbage, it has its head so far up its own ass it is breathing out its navel.
On a related subject, can somebody explain this blog entry to me? It appears to be a cut&paste of the article linked in the OP but several random words are substituted into the text:
Is this an attempt to fool search engines looking for plagiarism?
We are NOT sterilizing her. We are removing a dangerously damaged portion of her anatomy that also happens to deal with her reproductive tract. The tumor could just as well be on a breast, her nose or her left big toe.
Step away from your recreational and procreational outrage and deal with this thought:
If it was a forced removal of an eye, or a kidney, or half her pancreas, would you be as outraged, or is it because it is her reproductive system?
What if to save her life, she needed to have some small section in her brain removed that would leave her without a sense of taste or smell, would you be outraged?
Most people would say that she should just deal with not smelling and tasting, or having a left big toe - but once you drag reproduction in the huge shambling monster of the horror of nazi sterilization operations rears its ugly head in peoples minds … Nuremberg Judgements forcing sterilization … Oh Noes!!1!eleventy!
If she said that Dagon spoke to her and will heal her, would you change your mind? How about the Illuminati? Zeus? Let Jesus get one word in sidewise and it is ohmyfreakingGodREAL, but uf you claim that Dagon was going to cure you, booby hatch time.
The anatomy is irrelevant, the diety is irrelevant.
Her body, her choice.
My body, my choice.
Your body, government choice.
An illformed choice made by a mentally ill person isn’t a “choice”. Luckily, there are people out there who care enough about the mentally ill to make sure that when they aren’t able to take care of themselves, that they don’t die.
When you get done building your strawmen, let me know. Until then, it may not be her life, it’s the mental illness’ life. If her mental illness, and not her, that is making the decision that she doesn’t want to save her own life, that’s not a decision I’d support.
As I’ve said earlier, concluding one way or the other from the limited information you have about the woman’s mental state is an exercise in inanity, which, apparently, you’re more than happy to determine. But if she is mentally ill, that mental illness is influencing a decision that puts her at great risk of death, the judicial system shouldn’t just let her die.
And maybe it wouldn’t be something she’d object to, then.
It doesn’t really matter how big a font size you use. The court is trying to sterilize her against her wishes. That appears to be the part she’s objecting to.
Hamlet, I’m not forcing you to participate in this exercise in inanity. Honest.
I’m participating in a discussion of whether the mentally ill should be allowed to let themselves die, not idle speculation into the mental state of a woman I know next to nothing about. If you want to defend your assertion that the mentally ill should be allowed to make all decisions about their lives, no matter how high the risk of death or how much the illness influences at the decision, I’ll stick around thanks.