Consider the origin of the term, "caesarean section." Presumably, Mama Caesar did not survive. And yet the human population suggests that for every mother who died in childbirth, other mothers delivered more than one healthy baby.
It's a matter of risk. Most women can deliver babies. Doctors monitor them closely, often finding reasons to be concerned which ultimately turn out to be nothing. Nature has already stacked the odds in a woman's favor -- the doctor usually just provides security, certainty.
But that's a lot of attention to be paying to women, one after another, across the country, 24/7/365, considering that only a minority will actually need some kind of life-saving intervention. You might say that sort of care is "inefficient." After all, there are midwives for this sort of business, aren't there?
And there's a political side to this. These are young women. With entire lives, careers, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax revenue ahead of them. Families to raise. They're significant, vital. They're necessary.
History shows that most of them will survive childbirth without a doctor. And some will die even with one; fewer, still, will die because of their doctor. But there are a lot of resources which stand at the ready, and we will commit heroics to save a mother and her newborn. Life is that important.
Dying is part of life, too. The elderly have to die eventually, but that doesn't mean they ever have to die right now. Heroics won't stop death, but they can often put it off for a time, even if it never seems long enough.
And yet, politically, those heroics -- arguably as effective as all those resources that attend a healthy childbirth without actually contributing anything -- are somehow less necessary.
I noted that doctors watch expectant mothers closely, looking for things to be concerned about. And yet boards tell us not to screen so often or so early for breast cancer. Looking too closely, or too frequently, for prostate cancers wastes money. Our system is even accused of "wasting" care on cancers that might otherwise self-remit -- this is even used to refute our statistically superior cancer survival rates. Our numbers are "skewed" by finding and treating cancers that would never present on their own. We look too hard.
I can't say any choice is always wrong. And they don't call them "tough decisions" for nothing. But I have a problem -- a real problem -- with liberals' idea that we just pretend we're not making a choice. Their plan is not free -- they're just relying on small, under-represented minorities of the population to pay for it. As usual.
Extending lives costs money. That money -- and the care it might buy -- could be used to help other patients. Democrats see that trade, and they want to make it. Starting with the lives that are least "necessary."
Do you want that trade, too?
Do you even see it?
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