Nice to see O'Bama working on getting rid of midnight Bush rules

[Lissa]

My boss was an ass, and I started at less than $3 per hour. Doubt all you like.

This I don't doubt. What I doubt is that you got a number of raises in a few short months that made it difficult for them to keep you around. Getting rid of someone costs a business money in time spent having to find and train a new person a business would rather try to fix the situtaion that get rid of someone.

Be that as it may, this is totally getting away from the crux of what has been going on here.

Or, the professional when asked for counsel on life changing medical procedures use their best judgment, which includes their ethics and morality, in giving that counsel. The patient, who is actually in charge of their well being, can accept that advice, or shop around for more or better advice. Hence the saying, "Get a second opinion..."

Your duty as a medical provider is to provide the best care possible for your patients. If you know of some form of care that will benefit a patient, but believe that it goes against your morals, it is not your place to leave the information out from the patient. By doing so you are telling the patient your beliefs are more important than the patients well being. Sure the patient can go elsewhere to get a second opinion, but you're doing a disservice to the patient if you don't let them in on the information that you know. And who's to say that the other medical professionals the patient goes to see knows about the information that you know. Do you think then it's still right to withhold that information?

This is impractical because there can be many solutions to a problem, and so a professional would do best by laying out the "best" solutions to the problem. Again, most anyone who becomes pregnant has heard about "abortion". The GP may consider even the suggestion of "you could kill it" as unethical. If someone in our society is looking for an abortion, they know where to go (Planned Parenthood) and they don't need a referral. What you are suggesting is akin to forcing the 2nd century Christians to bow down and worship the Roman gods. Or, more directly in order to keep their chosen livelihood, you will have people violate their conscience and beliefs to satisfy your viewpoint on what is proper.

This is why the medical practioneer should lay out all the options. It's not impractical, it's good sense. Ultimately the medical practioneer is one part healer, one part psychologist, and one part sage. The medical practitioneer's job is to council, heal, and help their patient, thus improving the patient's quality of life. If you, as a medical practioneer, refuse to perform part of these duties, then you shouldn't be in the position of medical practioneer. People go to a medical practioneer to feel better, feeling better can vary from person to person and not everything works from one person to the next. This is why a medical practioneer must lay out all the options to the patient and let the patient be the final arbiter of what they do.

I'm narrow minded? It is you, in the face of alternative evidence, who cling to your own definition. You want to attach the field of medicine to "improving the quality of life" for some reason. I think a well running automobile, a fat bank account and a clean house improves my quality of life. It is a vague notion that can apply to almost anything.

And what happens if you get a terminal disease that leaves you in a great deal of pain, what is that automobile going to do to improve you quality of life? How about that clean house? That fat bank account? Improving one's quality of life can come from a number of different things, but what one chooses to improve one's quality of life will differ from person to person. In some cases, no amount of money, home, or car is going to do jack for a medical issue you have. Sure, you could use all those things in combination with the care provided by a medical practioneer to improve you quality of life, but in the end, that medical practioneer is not necessarily "healing" you, but making you more comfortable. So, as I said, you're too narrowminded on what you view medicine does.

You don't understand what medical professionals do and your continued arguement about a narrowminded view of what medicine is about shows that you don't understand it even when you post quotes from various doctors that state that medicine is about improve the quality of life of the patient.

Well, that is not what I said. So, get your jaw off the floor. I said, I think the doctor and the mother should make the decision that will affect both the life of the baby and the life of the mother. I never gave the life of the baby more weight than the life of the mother.

What you did was you danced a jig around it and never fully answered the question. You ellude to in your comments that you felt the unborn's life was more important, here let's go back and look at what you said:

Me? Personally? Let me take off my devil's advocate hat... I personally believe that the process of gestation is a continuum, where at the beginning there is an embryo which has the potential to become a human being, but around 5 months that embryo has been proven in many cases to be viable outside the womb when premature and assisted medically with incubators, respirators and steroids. So, ethically, that embryo becomes a human being sometime between months 2 and 5. Intentionally killing a fetus in months 5 through 9 in my mind would be infanticide. Those later months are where the fetus gets refinement and extra growing time. Not knowing exactly at what point a human being becomes one is an ethical issue that I would trust a doctor to decide, when weighing all the risk factors. I'm glad I'm not the one making the decision, because my uncertainty would tend to make me want to err ethically on the safe side. As a libertarian, I would want to grant full citizenship and constitutional protection to any fetus past 3 months of age. It would very much simplify much of case law involving children and rights.

So if I take this the way you wrote it, once an unborn child hits 5 months, even if the unborn child could kill the mother, the child must be born or it's infantcide. So the if birthing said unborn child kills the mother and the child, so be it because killing the child after 5 months is infantcide and the doctor should be put up on charges of some degree of murder even though the doctor is saving the life of the woman from a pregnancy gone bad. There isn't a whole lot of grey area here to work with Kan. You can hand wring all you want, but when it comes down to the choice, you either are potentially condeming two human beings to death or one that hasn't even experienced anything outside the womb.

I also said, that at some point in the pregnancy that the fetus is a human being, and that by my best measure of viability that it seems to be before 5 months. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, resuscitation of premature babies under 400g is not recommended. 400g is normally achieved at about 5 1/2 months. The fetus is fully formed at about 12 weeks. So the time period in doubt is that time between 12 weeks and 22 weeks. Even then, the fetus < 12 weeks old has the potential to become a human being, so ethically I wouldn't treat any fetus as arbitrarily disposable.

We're not talking about treating a fetus as disposable, we're talking about a situation where the mother's life is in danger if the pregnancy goes forward. Do you let the pregnancy continue and potentially give the mother in question a death certificate or do you end the pregnancy so that she may live. We're not talking about abortions for the purpose of birtch control, we're talking about abortion used in a life or death situation for the mother. This is not an arguement about having all abortions wildly available, this is about abortion under very specific terms, terms that most people say it should go forward.

RU428 causes abortion as well (is an abortifacient). There are other medicines (ECP's), such as "Plan B" or other "morning after pills" that are more effective in preventing pregnancy without the convulsive side effects of RU428 and other abortifacients.

Ummm...have you read about what RU-486 actually does? It stops ovulation, prevents fertilization, and can keep a fertilized egg from implanting itself on the uteran wall. We are talking about percribed amounts of RU-486 to perform this task, not high doses that is used in conjuction with other abortion methods. We are also talking specifically about rape victims using the drug in the way I just descriped in the second sentence, to prevent a pregnancy within a specific time frame (before the fertilized egg can implant on the uteran wall). I have been talking about very specific instances this entire time, but you want to include a further gambit, not the real issue at hand (dealing with rape victims stopping a potential pregnancy).

You make too many assumptions about me and my associations.

If you had associated with medical professionals, this whole arguement would be moot. The fact that you continue to push and make wild comments and try to use sources to make your arguement stand when the sources you give show the exact opposite shows that you don't have a good idea what medical professionals do. You think you know, but you don't have the experience of being around them and seeing what they do.