"Treating people as rational adults means letting them do things they may bitterly regret later"

NY Times’ case: What to do when you don’t agree with a patient’s decision.

Comments

KipEsquire
“There are no clear-cut rules or guidelines that physicians can fall back on,” said Daniel Wikler, an ethicist and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health…
Sure there are: specifically, simply refuse to perform the procedure.
I really didn’t grasp the doctor’s conundrum in the piece.
Matthew
To reference an earlier post on this blog, the problem is that our society has become both paternal and extraordinarily litigious at the same time. John Banzhaf (a man of low moral character, to be sure, but he’s good at what he does) is openly looking for ways to sue doctors when patients don’t stop smoking after being advised to do so. That’s the conundrum. With no clear-cut rules, plaintiffs lawyers smell money, and the avalanche begins. There’s no reason to think such legal activities would be limited to smoking.
Alison Cummins
I wish the example had been of something that was actually a bad idea.
A woman in her early twenties with two children pregnant with her third child is probably making an extremely rational assessment that she isn’t very good at birth control.
Yes an IUD is reversible, but it also isn’t as effective as a tubal ligation.
And three kids is enough, don’t you think? If someone can decide to add another human being to this overburdened planet, they can certainly decide not to.
Yes, sterilisation is a decision that is open to regret later. The thing is, so is having a child. But if you have a child and regret it you aren’t the only one affected: so is the child and so are the resources that child will consume.
Regarding future conditions, when she has married a wealthy childless man who wants her to make him some children of his own, knowing that the decision has already been made is actually quite relaxing. Not-gonna-happen, and you move on.
What is the author’s stake in wanting women fertile, at least potentially?
Interesting that this male doctor has a problem with women not wanting to continue their lives as walking uteruses, but a female urologist thinks sterilisation is a perfectly good decision to make at any age and has no problem with it at all:
http://urostream.blogspot.com/2006/08/never-too-young.html

"Treating people as rational adults means letting them do things they may bitterly regret later"

Related Stories

More in Uncategorized

Comments

Site

Channels

Subscribe

Related Stories

More in Uncategorized

Comments

Site

Channels