As this needs clarified:

You’re the one who brought up the state’s overriding “interference” in parental decisions that impact their sick children. You’re the one bringing black-white thinking to a complex and difficult problem space that is every shade of gray.

The pseudo-libertarian argument against this—that parents have absolute rights over their own children and no-one else (e.g. the state) has no right to override that, hands carte blanche to all misguided and abusive parents, including those who rape and murder their kids—not just the ones you seek to excuse. It is a warped argument from authority, where the only authority recognized is the parent’s own.

You dug that hole for yourself when you used Prince Rehan and Daniel Hauser as body shields in your own defense. If the state was torturing them for profit or glory, you’d have a point. You don’t: the state was protecting those children’s right to life in response to misguided or delusional parents who believe they know better, and act on those beliefs without even considering the harm they will cause if those beliefs are wrong.

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Yeah, chemo for blood cancers is tough as hell. (Though still better than it used to be.) Makes patients feel sick as a dog. Oncologists use it not because they enjoy it, but because it is the best treatment available right now. Fingers crossed that CAR-T renders it obsolete over the next decade or two, and children who develop leukemia 20 years from now will enjoy that new improved standard of care.

But nothing is simple, straightforward, or easy in dealing with cancer; and its history is thick with great hopes, smashed on hard reality. As you ought to know already. Because—ironically enough—cancer is a civil war within an organized cooperative society (a multicellular organism) and evangelical anarchist rebels out for nothing and no-one but themselves.

So what’s the anarchist’s position on parents who deny their own children the medical standard of care?

We both agree parents who abuse their kids sexually are wrong and must be stopped, regardless of those parents’ beliefs and justifications. So what about parents who kill?

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For those who appreciate finer distinctions such as “parents are not always right” and wish to explore further, the following blog post by an oncological research surgeon discusses one particular recent case and links to several more:

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2019/05/10/noah-mcadams-anot...

Unlike Mr Harps up there in his bloodless ivory tower, that’s a man down on the ground working in the ichor and guts of hard daily reality working to make things better, both for those sick now and all those who get sick in future.

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Now maybe Mr Harps will man up and do the damn legwork, and 20 years from now he’ll be getting his much deserved Nobel. If he does that, I will applaud him, and so will every other man, woman, and child on the planet. (Except, natch, the cancer quacks down in Tijuana who he just put out of business for good.)

Or maybe he’ll be down in a Tijuana clinic of his own, still raving about how HE has all the answers and it’s everyone else who is lazy and corrupt—just one more malignant quack amongst all the other fabulists and frauds, ushering his own abused victims to their poor and painful death.

The Belmont Report. Read it. And remember why it had to be written in the first place.

https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-repo...