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Sorry, I meant screen for. And yes, screening for people who suffer from genetic diseases. A lot of which we can't cure right now. But we are working on some
by cbanek 9y ago
Sorry, I meant screen for.
And yes, screening for people who suffer from genetic diseases. A lot of which we can't cure right now. But we are working on some of them. Childhood diseases are very tricky though, because they're typically quite rare, and many of the treatments are experimental.
As for screening out people who develop chronic conditions in life, we already do that. Cancer is a genetic disease that happens later in life, and sometimes we can't cure it. Sometimes that person wants assisted suicide rather than going through the pain of living. That's their choice I think.
I think the big thing is as technology progresses, and we can both cure more and people can't pay for it without insurance, what do we do? Should we cure 100 babies in Africa or one in the US? They're both life, but very different cost. Shouldn't we save more babies if we can? Does where a baby gets born imply how much we should care about it?
When you go as far as basically the holocaust, I think that's pretty crazy. We're talking about naturally occurring diseases and problems that we may or may not be able to cure. How much of someone else's money should be spent on it is an open and tricky question, as the patient would likely spend any amount to stay alive. At that point, maybe compassion is looking at the larger picture: we're all going to die at some point. But medicine these days is about delaying the inevitable at huge cost to someone else.
Really, I think the long term solution is taking the profit motive out of healthcare. If helping people live better lives isn't good enough, then maybe medicine isn't your field. And we should make healthcare non-profit and not tax it, and do other things to encourage it.
- unit91 9y ago> When you go as far as basically the holocaust, I think that's pretty crazy. Is it? 52 million babies have been killed by legal abortion in the U.S. since 1969 [1]. That's vastly more than the Holocaust. We're living through the American Holocaust right now. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_U...
- cbanek 9y agoThat pales in comparison to the contraception apocalypse. And now that more have access to contraception, abortion rates are steadily going down, which I think everyone can agree is a good thing.
- jacobolus 9y ago(Some) conservative Christians absolutely do not agree with this. Hence abstinence-only education, shuttering planned parenthood, cutting requirements that insurance cover contraceptives and cutting government funding for them (and health services for women more generally), trying to restrict access to Plan B, etc. For folks trying to make policy on moral absolutist grounds, the outcome (number of abortions, stable healthy families, ..) doesn’t really matter as much as making sure all of the relevant questions have black-and-white legal status in accordance to the extent possible with their religious beliefs. Trying to get deontologists and consequentialists to agree on policy is difficult partly because they typically don’t understand each-others philosophical frameworks, and talk past each-other, making assumptions (e.g. less abortions = good) which are not valid to the other party.
- 35bge57dtjku 9y agoIt might not look like quite the same Holocaust level event when you control for the ones that would have died anyway. But hey, let's not examine the details when we can just spread hysteria instead. And then when you look at the other 2 leading causes of death, which are about as bad or worse in numbers, your hysteria looks even more misplaced. And then there's the fact that about 30% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, or approx. a million per year, about twice as many as now get aborted. What kind of crazy numbers would we get if we summed all those up since 1952, also?
- imcrs 9y agoSorry to be pedantic, but it is important: fetuses or embryos are aborted, they are not babies until they are born.
- cbanek 9y agoTotally agree in terms of a normal legal definition. Of course different religions have different views on the more metaphysical concept, I find it interesting that it seems for Jewish people, that babies aren't considered "fully formed people" (spiritually speaking) until a number of days after birth. Source: http://www.momentmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/When-does-life-begin.pdf http://www.momentmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/When-doe...