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How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

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Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#101

Post by KittenInABox »

RickJWagner wrote: post #97
ehnto wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other reasons people want to get abortions, such as knowing they can't provide for the child or give them a safe/stable household. Adoption is rare, and the foster system in most countries absolutely ruins kids. So those aren't good alternatives.

I'd hope someone would know fairly early in the pregnancy if they will be able to provide for a child or not. (i.e. before the baby can feel pain, is basically a complete human being, etc.) That's why there's so much interest in defining limits around abortions. Late term abortions are pretty much described as horrific by the vast majority. There should be room for political agreement here.

My understanding is that late term abortions are almost always cases of extreme tragedy already.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#102

Post by arcbyte »

ehnto wrote: post #79
dimitrios1 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we see how this has worked out for abortion. The 0.10% case of either saving a woman's life or in cases of rape and incest as turned into the justification for aborting 189 babies for every 1000 live births -- or in the african american community 487 babies for every 1000 live births. Once you open the flood gates, you will have plenty who kill themselves who otherwise wouldn't with just a little bit of extra sup…

There are other reasons people want to get abortions, such as knowing they can't provide for the child or give them a safe/stable household. Adoption is rare, and the foster system in most countries absolutely ruins kids. So those aren't good alternatives.

Well he did qualify the reasons he provided as being only 0.1%. So obviously there are 99.9% more reasons.

But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience. It's more convenient to murder this baby than to not murder it so murder it is.

There is a very important and overlooked 7% of abortions that are medically related that save the whole concept of legal abortion for me. Mothers who want babies but, because literally everything in biology can go wrong in ways that make abortion the only humane option, those poor women can't. And they don't need police investigating their terminations in the middle of unimaginable grief.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#103

Post by KittenInABox »

arcbyte wrote: post #102
ehnto wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other reasons people want to get abortions, such as knowing they can't provide for the child or give them a safe/stable household. Adoption is rare, and the foster system in most countries absolutely ruins kids. So those aren't good alternatives.

Well he did qualify the reasons he provided as being only 0.1%. So obviously there are 99.9% more reasons. But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience. It's more convenient to murder this baby than to not murder it so murder it is. There is a very important and overlooked 7% of abortions that are medically related that save the whole concept of legal abortion for me. Mothers who want…

My understanding is that prior to abortion being legalized, attempted abortion was not an uncommon cause of death. If someone is so willing to avoid pregnancy that they kill themselves, I don't know if it can be reasonably described as convenience anymore.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#104

Post by supperburg »

Sebb767 wrote: post #64
OneEyedRobot wrote: post #46

What ticks me off no end is the folks who (often successfully) fight against physician assisted suicide. Dementia is the interesting test case, but I think should still be allowed. With all the talk about 'controlling our bodies' in terms of abortion, and I can see both sides of that one, your own life is the one thing you really own. To have that control taken away is the worst kind of insult by the state.

I think the core problem is giving out a "free pass" to kill people. Very few people (at least in my experience) think that assisted suicide itself is bad, but the abuse potential is massive. And the action is, by definition, irreversible. Plus, the people that need this are (quite obviously) unable to make this happen on their own. So this comes with the additional moral qualms of whether this is really what the wan…

You are a person who has never been in the very unfortunate position of needing to die. That’s why suicide will never be accepted. Because so few people ever get stuck in that situation.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#105

Post by hindsightbias »

IncRnd wrote: post #85
MBCook wrote: post #69

Wasn’t this one of the things the “death panels” (as so expertly branded by Republicans) were supposed to help with? Helping people on Medicare decide on how they wanted to approach these kind of issues and what they wanted for advanced directives? Unfortunately so much of this is decided at the last minute as people are terrified or just desperate for any lifeline no matter the consequences. Choices that, had they m…

> Wasn’t this one of the things the “death panels” (as so expertly branded by Republicans) were supposed to help with? Helping people on Medicare decide on how they wanted to approach these kind of issues and what they wanted for advanced directives? No. A death panel does not decide when someone is to die but when treatment is to be stopped due to mounting costs, regardless of the wishes of the patient.

There never was a death panel in the ACA

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#106

Post by H8crilA »

amyjess wrote: post #91
amatecha wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be so quick to decide this now -- consider your options at the time, if such a thing arises. It may not be so cut & dry as "terminal" and there's a huge amount of variability in how cancer diagnoses go. In the meantime, take the best care of your body you possibly can :)

Even if the cancer has a very high survival rate following chemo, if the only way to save my life involves losing my hair I will refuse treatment and let myself die.

I mean, first - the loss of hair is temporary, second - not all cancers are that vicious. It might be worth it if the probability of survival after treatment is high. This article was about almost certainly incurable cases, treatment or not.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#107

Post by H8crilA »

pochekailov wrote: post #36

Today's medicine is focused to treat the diseases, refusing to admit that people at 70-80 years old die not from disease, but from the old age. Everybody but a few enthusiasts refuse to treat ageing instead of cancer or heart diseases. People in general refuse to treat ageing as a disease, thinking it is something natural. I would not want a couple more miserable years on earth, I want a few million years of a health…

Dude. Nobody has the slightest idea how to effectively treat "aging". The billionaires that engage in that fantasy might be pushing the state of the art a little bit, sure, but they do it from a starting position of absolute ignorance, and their efforts are mostly in vain.

It's like that old joke about a group of PMs that have "invented the general AI". Now all that's left to do is for some researchers and engineers to create it.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#108

Post by api »

OneEyedRobot wrote: post #46

What ticks me off no end is the folks who (often successfully) fight against physician assisted suicide. Dementia is the interesting test case, but I think should still be allowed. With all the talk about 'controlling our bodies' in terms of abortion, and I can see both sides of that one, your own life is the one thing you really own. To have that control taken away is the worst kind of insult by the state.

The problem is the possibility that physician assisted suicide will be abused to clear out people who are costly to treat by gently urging them to take the option, or other similar scenarios like a family urging someone to take the option so they can get early inheritance.

It's one of those things that I might support in idealistic principle but where I develop serious reservations when I factor in how ugly people can be in real life.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#109

Post by mbg721 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #44
pochekailov wrote: post #36

Today's medicine is focused to treat the diseases, refusing to admit that people at 70-80 years old die not from disease, but from the old age. Everybody but a few enthusiasts refuse to treat ageing instead of cancer or heart diseases. People in general refuse to treat ageing as a disease, thinking it is something natural. I would not want a couple more miserable years on earth, I want a few million years of a health…

Just yesterday there was an article on Hacker News attacking Bezos for having the pride and selfishness to attempt to cure aging: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440348 "Be fine with dying of old age or else you're a villain" is this weird, fundamental, Christian part of our common mythos/ethics/stories. The evil villain seeks immortality. The kindly old witch or wizard or Pope dies peacefully because it is ri…

There's a long tradition of wealthy people with various delusions of having the secrets to defeat death, from Steve Jobs to Howard Hughes and beyond. The Christian tradition scoffs at that because it always fails, and exposes the fragility of even massive earthly wealth, where the Christian priority would be to reject the riches of this world in order to build wealth in the next. That doesn't seem so weird to me.

Re: How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)

#110

Post by arcbyte »

KittenInABox wrote: post #103
arcbyte wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well he did qualify the reasons he provided as being only 0.1%. So obviously there are 99.9% more reasons. But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience. It's more convenient to murder this baby than to not murder it so murder it is. There is a very important and overlooked 7% of abortions that are medically related that save the whole concept of legal abortion for me. Mothers who want…

My understanding is that prior to abortion being legalized, attempted abortion was not an uncommon cause of death. If someone is so willing to avoid pregnancy that they kill themselves, I don't know if it can be reasonably described as convenience anymore.

Perhaps we should make phone books bulletproof if we're going to idiotproof the world. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/us/youtube-shooting-minne...
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