Learn from the mistakes of others

thalidomide is back on the medicare list as a cancer treatment.

many of the cancer drugs are nasty beasties. after all, they're intended to kill very tenacious organisms - which happen to be parts of ourselves.

the masses are emotional. thinking is a secondary activity. they remember how they felt much better than what they were thinking.

it was not surprising, but still disappoinitng, to see how quickly an issue about the proper authority to regulate a particular therapeutic drug became a screaming match over how people feel about deliberate miscarriage.

i'm hearing mixed signals about the place regarding ru-486 availability. until i hear more from my source in medicare australia, i'll just wait and see.

the 'aborting ourselves out of existence' was more a reflex of personal rage locally than the larger context. plenty of 'religious' people object to the killing of embryos and feotuses per se ... refusing to accept that neither are independent living things, and more particularly they're only interested in their own feelings on the matter. until very late in pregnancy, the putative child is not independant of the woman who carrying it. without her body, the developing body has no life.

having spent some time with a pregnant woman, and more time with biology, i have a pretty good outsider's understanding of the process. i also have a personal experience with parenting. no one should be forced to carry, give birth to, and then parent if they do not want to. but the nutters don't see things that way. they're fixated on 'every life is sacred' - by which they really mean 'we ought to control every life'.

if as much energy and effort was put into teaching kids about the value of their own lives and giving them the tools to manage themselves there might be a few more adults who were equipped for adulthood. some of them might even become adults, rather than reactive adolescents with drivers licences.