another story about how some people should not have children

[steve from staten island]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/10/health/teen-getting-forced-chemo-in-remission/index.html

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I can not even consider how a parent would not do everything under the sun to save there child if they had a serious illness. No i never had cancer and had to suffer through Chemo but yes i did see up close how sick it made someone and yes i did see it extend that persons life and hopefully as a result of its effect on there cancer will continue to slow or halt more cancerous tumors from coming back. After her last bout of chemo (there are many different types) she was very sick and swore to me she'd never take it again. I said nothing as i knew when and if ever that time comes again we'll cross that bridge then. Sick children with cancer is something i can't handle to well. I saw a few sick children during my time at the hospital,it really tear's me up

 

[Bruzilla]

I still have a tough time with this case. My mother-in-law had cancer of the lymph nodes and was placed an an experimental chemo with four other people. She tried to hold out, but the treatment was so painful she had herself taken off of it because she felt she would rather die than go through the constant pain. As it turned out, the decision saved her life. The other four people died and the doctors found out that the cancer cells kept dying even after she was taken off the drug. That was over a decade ago and she's still in complete remission.

I'm not saying I'm against chemotherapy or drugs, but I do think the decision to take them, or not take them is, is one that must always be left to the patient and their family, and never the government. This girl wasn't an infant, or a nine-year old. She was 17, which is old enough to join the military. If she made her decision, she should have been allowed to stick with it. It might have been the wrong decision, but every doctor who talked to my mother-in-law told her the decision she made was the wrong one too, and to this day she still says she would have rather died than stay on that course of treatment.

I think there are some places the government has no business in, and this is one of them.

 

[Moparsmitty]

This is a tough case, but to me it all boils down one question. How old do you think someone should be to be able to refuse medical treatment? 21? 18? 16?.... Adults generally have the right to refuse medical treatment but it's been proven over and over in the courts that parents do not have the right to refuse life saving medical treatment for their children, even on religious grounds. There have been several cases where parents have been convicted of voluntary manslaughter for letting their children die without providing medical care. It's a very personal issue, but I think that every kid deserves a shot at a good long life.

 

[Cranky]

Flight risk at 17? Flight risk from what? Our oldest daughter was on her own at 17 1/2. I was out by 18 but would have left earlier had I not been still in high school as a senior at 17.

 

[1971 plymouth roadrunner]

She has every right to make decisions for herself. If she doesn't want to burden our system with chemo that she feels won't better her life, than great for her. Although her decision may seem to be kinda poor, some people just don't want to go through the pain required to treat cancer. I heard somewhere that she doesn't believe that chemo helps people? I don't know if that is right, but I can say that it saved my mother's life after she was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. She is entitled to her beliefs, although I would personally question her sources.

 

[Finallygotmine]

This kind of stuff really bothers me. The government has no right to intrude on your health. Forced chemo? really? Anyone forcing someone into treatment should be taking the same treatment right along side of the sick person. Different people react differently to treatments. This sets a dangerous precedent. Where is the line? headaches? flu? If someone wants to die, why should we say otherwise? This country was founded on the thought that you can live your life without the king watching and dictating your life. Individual freedom.

 

[steve from staten island]

The issue is not about freedom of choice for a adult. If you have cancer and chemo is needed and you refuse thats your right. If your child has cancer and you neglect to provide that child with the medical care they need thats child abuse. Our government protects children that are not protected by there parents. This girl was still under age and as the article states her best chance of survival was getting chemo treatments. I would never even think of insulting anyone by saying what would you do if it was your kid as i know what all of you would do. And thats anything possible to help your child. This kid deserved the same.

 

[Lets Roll]

Cancer sucks, Both my parents had it. My mother had remission and still alive. My father died from complications from chemo. I wouldn't want the karma of forcing anyone into Chemo, its nasty stuff. I understand the need for Government to stop abuse but a 17 yr old.. I think it should have been her choice even if she wasn't a legal adult.

 

[747mopar]

I've thought about what I'd do if I ever were to get it after watching the agony that Chemo puts people threw, I honestly don't know.

 

[Bruzilla]

I just think there's this notion going around that government has an iron-clad responsibility to save people. That's not the job of government. The problem is there are a lot of people who, with the best of intentions, want to save and protect everyone but can't by themselves. So they turn to the government to do collectively what they cannot do individually, and every time this happens we lose a little more personal freedom.

To Steve's point of "Our government protects children that are not protected by there (sic) parents", this is a notion that started in the late 1800s when the government started supporting homes for children who had lost their parents, and was, and is, a noble effort. Then over the years this expanded to providing for children who's parents couldn't provide for them. Then this expanded into providing for children who's parents didn't provide for them at a specific level that is deemed to be adequate by the government. And now it's expanding into a case like this where a parent has provided for their child very well, has been there for them, but the government doesn't like this parenting decision so they're just going to step in and take over. Where does this end? What's the next step in this evolution of government control and loss of personal freedom?

Will the government next decide it has the power to control all medical decisions from birth to 18 years old? Sounds outrageous, but go back to the 1890s and ask the folks then if they think it's possible the government could ever force a 17-year old to receive medical treatment the parent and patient did not want. They would tell you you're crazy. I would hate to see a 17-year old girl die for making a questionable judgement, but I hate to see all of our freedoms diminish to protect one girl from being a fool.

 

[steve from staten island]

B it should be noted your opinions are your own. Your thoughts on the welfare of children are way off base. The govt as you say has protected many a neglected child. Are you implying that child services should be shut down? The question in this case could be more about the legal age. Any health care professional has a legal obligation to report any signs of what they think could be child neglect. That could also be a parent who does not follow up on medical care for a child or does not get medical care for a child. Seventeen years old unless we change the legal age is still considered a minor. The story is about a parent who would not provide the proper care for a under age person. A child is not property like a animal,you cannot say one day when your child is sick that you don't feel like obtaining needed medicine because you don't want the govt telling you what to do. The country does not and will never work like that. However due to the ignorance or abuse of parents.people who are in government with the support of the public created laws which protect the innocent.
I have to wonder in ten or twenty years from now when this young lady is a adult maybe with her own family she will look back and think about what her mother did?

 

[Bruzilla]

Steve, what I'm saying is government agencies, such as child services, are never, ever, static. There has never been any government organ or agency in history that has ever remained static. The folks who work in these are always looking for new areas to delve into, new avenues for funding, new "areas of need" that must be addressed. You want to look at child services as it is today and see a good thing. Someone from the 1890s would likely look at what they do today as a tremendous trampling of personal freedom. And what will we see when we look at what children's services is doing 20 or 30 years from now? What expansion of their powers will they have achieved by then? This particular case would have never been brought 30 years ago because the courts would have found no legal standing to bring it. Now they not only find standing, but support the plaintiff and set a new legal precedent for the government having the power to not only over-turn a parent's decision, a power they took on 20 years ago, but can also over-turn a child's decision even if she's past the age of emancipation. So they question is, where do you draw a line in regards to what power the government is entitled to have? You don't seem to have any limits in mind if the ends justify the means, and to me that's extraordinarily dangerous. Do they need to be shut down? No. Do they need to have their power seriously reigned in? Absolutely yes!

As for how I will feel in 10 or 20 years when this girl has a family, you need not wonder. I can tell you right now how I will feel... exactly as I feel right now. And my feelings are that this girl's death, assuming she died, would be a tragedy, but setting a new legal precedent for expanding the power of government to save her would be a far bigger tragedy. It is not the job of government to save everyone from themselves. The job of government is to provide for the general welfare and safety of society, not micromanage everyone's lives in order to save the occasional fool from his or herself.

 

[steve from staten island]

B there seems to be always a either sinister plot,corruption or whatever in any govt agency when you talk of this sort of thing. What happened in the 1800's and how someone would look at this today is not the point. When you talk about personal freedom lets keep it the context of the discussion because your scarring me. Nobody in this country has the "personal freedom" to abuse there children. There is no discussion on that. When you neglect to care for your kids its neglect and until the laws are changed a 17 yr old is a minor. When a woman who appeared to be on something brought her daughter into a a clinic for dental work and my kid saw her mouth was full of cavities,infection,the child was dirty and smelt dirty and then the mother decided she did not want to follow up on taking care of this kid and tried to run out of the clinic. What would you call that? Freedom of choice? My daughter alerted her superior who then called child services. Whats your take on that? Did they do that in 1890? The answer is NO.
In the state of NJ when my friend brought his grandkid in with a broken arm,he was questioned,not subject to interrogation,just questioned. To many kids are abused and if it takes some agency's to help protect them then so be it.

 

[Bruzilla]

And there you go Steve, "To (sic) many kids are abused and if it takes some agency's to help protect them then so be it" is exactly what I said. To you, the end justifies the means, and if the end is taking away freedoms then you're fine with that mean because you agree with the ends, and to me that's a dangerous mindset. Should government take action to protect children who can't protect themselves? Absolutely. But this "child" could take care of herself. Amazingly, if this girl were 12 and wanted to have an abortion in NJ, she is deemed legally responsible to make that decision, and a parent has no right to object. You Progressives want to bestow the ability to make life and death decisions when you approve of the ends, but not when you disapprove. You can't have it both ways.

You mentioned your friend in NJ. Well, here's my story back to you. I was on the community council of Howard County. MD when we lived in Columbia, MD. While I was there, a funding resolution came up for the building and operation of a special child welfare center that would provide a workplace for child services employees to respond to a supposed rapidly increasing threat to abused children. Very noble intent to be sure, but then I started asking questions about the justification for creating a separate center instead of continuing to use existing government assets, and I was told by the head of Social Services that the justification was the greatly increasing number of "reports" of child abuse.

As soon as I heard "reports", I got curious. I asked what was causing all these parents to suddenly start abusing their children, and she said they were dealing with "reports" of child abuse. I then asked for the core data for her research, and when I got it I found that the actual incidences of child abuse were way down over the past five years of their study. What had gone up were the reports of child abuse, which only about 2% of reported child abuse cases ended up actually being child abuse, and only 1.3% ended up seeing any form of prosecution. So what drove up the number of reports? It was other programs that went out to schools, hospitals, doctors, daycare center operators, and even Chuckie Cheese employees to report any situation they thought could be child abuse. So gone were the days when doctors were trained to look for unexplained bruising, multiple-broken bones, or emotional withdraw and now we've got parents' lives being seriously disrupted because some teacher or even a doctor sees something they think might/could be.maybe is some sort of abuse. There was no increase in demand for services, so they just changed the definition to create an increase. So what's the result? Are they stopping child abuse? No. Are they preventing it? No. Now they're so over-swamped with reports of abuse that they can't ever get enough assets to properly investigate every single claim that comes in, and they're busy running around investigating the 98% of bogus cases that they can't take the time to properly investigate the 2% of genuine cases and more and more of them are falling through the cracks.

As for Howard County, I filed a recommendation that funding for the center not be approved, and instead we fund something that will help everyone... like developing an education program for people who can actually identify child abuse based on well-defined criteria instead of running about responding to reports from a Chuckie Cheese employee who didn't like that a mom swatted her kid on the bottom.

And as for sinister plots, you're damn right I see them. I saw them in the military. I saw them in law enforcement. I saw them in CMS. Government employees are no different than any other employee. People who never improve or change anything don't stand out or get promoted. The best way to get promoted is increase revenues, grow the division, implement new rules or procedures, improve performance, etc., and this is how government grows. Every agency wants more responsibility so they can get more funding, and attitudes like yours allow it to happen. You want to expand the size of the children's services budget while the need for services is going down... just change the reporting criteria so you can show an increase in need. This is the same deal we're seeing now with Autism. You want more money for research even though the need is decreasing, change what qualifies as an Autism diagnosis and voila! You have an instant increase in need. Every agency in the government does this crap.

 

[steve from staten island]

So what you saw In MD is the bases for your entire opinion. Child abuse is over blown. I never heard of fast food employees being trained to spot abused kids,were did you hear that? Or is it just plain out not true? Are you saying a medical doctor is not qualified to spot a neglected kid? Are you saying a board certified pediatric dentist such as my kid is not qualified to determine if a parent or guardian is neglecting the health of there child? Attitudes like mine? i can only thank the Lord people with your mindset are in the minority. You again resort to personal attacks by saying that i support expanding govt spending for children's services while those services go down. Were did that come from? What i addressed was specific topic,what you did was bring your distorted view into it while going off on some tangent about the evil govt. Consider the subject closed

 

[Bruzilla]

Such a typical Progressive response. Once a Conservative shows why your views or wrong or contradictory, you consider the matter closed. I'll hand it to you... you guys are consistent.

Once you strip away all the peripheral nonsense, the argument is still how intrusive into our personal lives should the government be? You, like most supporters of a Big Government Nanny State feel the government should be entitled to take whatever actions it deems necessary to intervene in our lives provided the ends of such actions are ones you agree with, and has absolutely no business doing so when the ends are ones you disagree with. You guys always think government action is like a faucet that you can turn and off when it suits you.

Conservatives like me see that you Progressives can no more control what government does than you can what people do. We view you guys as being like kids playing with fire. Yes, you might just use it for some constructive purpose, but more likely you're going to do a lot of damage that we're all going to suffer from. You guys always do things with the best of intentions, but then the fire you start always gets out of control and grows and becomes destructive. To my point, we've gone from child services meant to take care of those who couldn't take care of themselves, to taking care of those the government feels aren't being taken care of good enough, to those who the government feel should be taken care of better by the government, and my question again is where does this ever stop? When is it ever enough?

As you've stated, it's never enough. Every time someone feels the government should do more, the courts should be used to create a new legal precedent for the government to take more control of our lives, and while you do this for a very specific case (such as this poor girl with cancer) you set the precedent for other people to use this same deal on whatever cases they deem worth it, and before long you've handed more control to the government and taken more freedom away from the people.

The saying "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" has been around for so long for a reason... because it's true. As with most Progressive nightmares, you have the finest of intentions in wanting to save this girl from herself. No question there. And you and anyone else should be free to do whatever you can within your own rights to change her mind. If you're a doctor you should talk to her. If you're a support group person you should talk to her. If you're a priest you should talk to her. But if all those efforts fail, we have to balance the needs of the many against the needs of the one, and ask if keeping this girl alive against her wishes is worth extending the paving on that road to Hell by setting a new legal precedent that's going to affect the personal decisions of millions of Americans? I would emphatically answer, now or in 20 years, with a resounding "no" to that question.

 

[steve from staten island]

She's a minor,a child, get it. Her mother doesn't give a ****,do you get that to. My response to you is when it comes to children we have already set a as you say "new legal precedent" and that is we protect children at all costs. This is not nor will ever be a Conservative vs Progressive issue as conservatives many of which are as compassionate and protective about young people as anyone else. You can twist it into a argument to support your views which suites your needs but i can assure you many who are sitting on the side lines would not agree with you. It also does not surprise me you won't even address my questions. Again were talking parental health decisions concerning underage children,nothing more.

 

[TekHousE]

My mother died of cancer. She was diagnosed and then refused mainstream medical treatment because she wished to have a quality of life without chemo etc. We respected that. But I asked her if one of her children had had cancer, would she have allowed treatment, and she said she would insist on it for a child that could not decide for themselves.

I think parents should allow this or the authorities need to step in. Religion or whatever reason for NOT allowing highly successful treatments should be against the law.

 

[steve from staten island]

Sorry about your Mom. My wife suffers also from cancer Stage 4 but she is doing well and owes her life to the doctors that took care of her and there experience. She told me after her last chemo that she was done with it and did not want it again. However i doubt when she looks at her grandchildren she refuse it. The point is we all know its personal but usually refusing chemo is when there is no chance of surviving. Sloan Memorial is one of the top cancer hospitals in the world. They told us point blank that when and if it gets to the point of no chance then they focus on quality of life not making you sick just to live in pain another few months
All of this has nothing to do with this sick child. She had a great chance of surviving if she got chemo. Its up to us as a nation to protect those who can't protect themselves and in this case it was a kid. There's a difference in a 80 yr old battling cancer for a few years and does not want it and a under age child being subject to the neglecting attitude of a parent.