From: Gavin.Flower@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Gavin Flower)
Subject: Re: Response to Deluge About Hillary Clinton
Organization: Dept. of Comp. Sci., Victoria Uni. of Wellington, New Zealand.
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 22:42:36 GMT

In article <1992Jul23.160445.14058@news.nd.edu> slarsen@titian.helios.nd.edu (susan larsen) writes:
[... I have omitted references to my previous post ...]
>The unfortunate thing about my cousin's situation is that his 
>parents were simply turned off by the concept of surgery.  There 
>were no religious prohibitions and finances were not a major 
>consideration.  In fact, when another member of the family was 
>faced with an emergency surgical situation, this contingent of 
>the family cast their vote against surgery at that time, also. 
>To be generous, their decision vis-a-vis my cousin may have been 
>a judgment call, but my cousin who was most affected by the call 
>had no voice in the matter.  Family dynamics were such that 
>this was all handled outside of my cousin's knowledge!  I found 
>out about it after his death, because the adult contingent of my 
>family would discuss how his death was an avoidable tragedy.   
>Since I suffer from the same condition which caused my cousin's 
>death, as do every one of my siblings, I do have a lot of medical
>knowledge acquired on my own which tends to back up my impression 
>that a better decision was to go ahead with the surgery.  
>
>Hindsight, as always, is 20/20, though.
[... omitting my example of my son possibly demanding glasses through
the legal system ...]
>It is just my fervent hope that a balance can be struck between 
>preserving the rights of parents to make necessary decisions and 
>the rights of children.  I can certainly see that if your son 
>needed glasses to see the blackboard at school, he would have them.
>
>What about the child who is almost legally blind and a parent refuses to 
>buy him glasses as punishment against some infraction?  What is 
>the child's recourse?  Or the child whose leg got clawed up by 
>a cat but the parents were too busy to take the child to get 
>stitched up?  Or the child with rotten teeth whose mother is 
>waiting until the child turns 18, praying that the teeth stay 
>in so that she doesn't have to bother her second husband, who 
>doesn't like the kid hanging around anyway?  Should these 
>children have recourse, or is this just the price that they 
>have to pay for being born into the "wrong" family?  To make 
>it less hypothetical, I know these children.  The blind boy 
>missed out of so much in school, that he never caught up with 
>his peers and finds it hard to work to pay for his own eye care. 
>The girl with the cat grew up with hideous scars on her legs 
>and she can't bring herself to wear skirts.  The girl with the 
>teeth had to have all of them pulled before her 30th birthday, 
>but she is very happy with the look of her full set of dentures.
[...]
>I will grant you that litigation may not be the answer, but it is 
>an answer.  The question is an important one that probably does not 
>have one single answer.  But I think that part of the answer could 
>be to recognize that children do have certain rights with regard 
>to the quality of their care.  

These and the next are particularly good points, IMHO.

>I also think that another part of the 
>answer is to recognize that our society is capable of guaranteeing 
>a certain level of subsistence, which includes medical care and 
>family support.  I think that another part of the answer lies in 
>changing our perceptions of family away from the rosy, can-do-no-
>wrong sort of 1950s ideal toward a more realistic assessment of 
>what family life is, how it affects the various members, when it 
>should be preserved and when it should be dissolved. Another part 
>of the answer is to offer families assistance when in crisis, to 
>recognize that, for instance, the mother and father of triplets 
>needs extra help; or that the alcoholic father, is a good man with 
>a treatable problem; or that the abusive mother is a good woman 
>who desparately needs stress management.
>
>And finally, to realize that asserting rights for children does 
>not necessarily have to translate into a loss for parents.
>By recognizing that children have needs that can and should be met, 
>on not only a family level but a societal level, we would, I think, 
>be practicing good preventive medicine.
>
>
>Sue Larsen
>slarsen@berlin.nd.edu

Sue, that was brilliant!  I greatly appreciate the quality of your
reply, and the careful consideration of what I was attempting to get
accross in my own post. 

I was going to reply to the other followup to my post, but Sue puts
things in perspective better than I could of, so I won't.

I have deliberately avoided quoting from my previous post, Sue's
comments stand by themselves.


Gavin
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