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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)

#111

Post by kibwen »

armchairhacker wrote: post #100
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…

Holy crap those numbers are awful. Personally I'm slightly on the side of pro-choice, but we really need to educate people more on birth control.

Bafflingly, the same political forces that oppose abortion also oppose both birth control and sex education.

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

#112

Post by JamesBarney »

metalliqaz wrote: post #95
slg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the abuse potential is massive. How so? We don't have to create a system in which it is legal to shoot someone in the head and then claim they asked you to do it. Have it be a medical procedure that must be done in a hospital by government certified doctors. You can even require a psych evaluation before it becomes an option. I can understand there being some gray area in which it isn't clear that the person ha…

... then the psych evaluator gets sued by kin, etc.

Well the first problem is that it's not legal. Lets fix that problem for fixating on the secondary issue of the American legal system exacerbating principal-agent problems

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

#113

Post by coliveira »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #96
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a lot better societal outcomes. Unwanted babies suck and end up having bad lives, negatively affecting their parents’ lives as well.

Too bad we can't ask unwanted babies if they would rather have been born into a bad life. This isn't directed at you, but I have had countless conversations about this very topic. The detriments are greatly overstated. I've found usually people are talking of these things outside looking in in an ideological vacuum, and not an experiential one. Let's take societal outcomes for african americans, as an example. What p…

If society wants more babies, the path is easy: provide financial help for couples and single mothers. The way it currently is, abortion is very attractive.

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

#114

Post by kibwen »

mertd wrote: post #28
jt2190 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s some actual data: “Most physicians would forgo aggressive treatment for themselves at the end of life, study finds” https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2014/05/most-physicia...

Take it with a grain of salt just like any self reported study. Their preference may very well change when they become the patient.

Anyone with this opinion will have DNR orders on file. Their preference is already locked in.

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

#115

Post by ehnto »

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…

> But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience.

It is absolutely not convenience. To flip it another way, these are often homes you would never allow to adopt a baby, or homes where the child is inevitably taken by child services due to abuse or incapacity of the parent(s). Then they end up in foster care, far too late to be adopted by the nice well-to-do family with a white picket fence, and they bounce around the foster system.

The foster system can't even handle all the kids that aren't adopted, and some kids end up too broken to stay in care. What happens then? At some point they just throw a bunch of broken kids into a shitty house together and have a child services worker come check in on them every day or so.

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

#116

Post by ehnto »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #99
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.

>Adoption is rare What you mean by that? There is extremely high demand to adopt newborns, which is why parents desperate for children adopt from other countries. There is currently a waiting list of 2 million families willing to adopt newborns. Children in foster care are different story - people are much less willing to adopt older kids.

I mean that most kids who end up without a home were never up for adoption anyway, for whatever reason the child was taken away from a home that couldn't take care of it and as you mentioned, they're too old now.

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

#117

Post by ehnto »

arcbyte wrote: post #110
KittenInABox wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

So you don't think we should try and protect the lives of the parents?

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

#118

Post by ehnto »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #87
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.

This goes along with my thesis that if given the proper support, we would avoid the majority of them.

I'm not certain there is a level of foster care that could provide good outcomes. I think that's a bit of a pipedream. If your argument is instead that a shitty life is better than no life at all, I couldn't really disagree. But I think it's somewhat inhumane to bring a new life into the world knowing it will be suffering.

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

#119

Post by ehnto »

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.

I know it's relevant because it's the politics that are setting the rules right now, but political agreement isn't really the crux of the discussion for me. It's about minimizing suffering and the ethics of controlling someone else's body.

That said, I don't think there will be political agreement because it's not 100% about the rules around abortions anyway. It's a political instrument at this point. Either side is trying to win, not do what's right, and that's how things have gotten so extreme.

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

#120

Post by kixiQu »

refurb wrote: post #32
hirundo wrote: post #10

My mom struggled with lung cancer for two terrible years with cutting edge treatment, and died badly. My dad cared for her through that, and when his turn came five years later, he had no doubts. He refused all but palliative care and died in two months. What he saw once, a physician will see over and over ad nauseam. Having seen one of each, I'm not conflicted over which path I'd take.

The point is you don’t know which path you’ll go down until you go down it. Look at any cancer drug trial and there is a massive spread in outcomes. Some people take a drug and die with horrible side effects in 2 months, others live 10 years with mild side effects.

There's a lot of comfy middle ground between "I do not want any medications; I will go home and wrap myself in a linen shroud" and "please break my nonagenarian ribs then barely sustain me in purgatorial discomfort as long as technology allows". And yet one of those endpoints has become the legal/social default.
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