A few snippets from the article:
“They gave her some medication, but they didn’t do any tests, didn’t do any CT scans. If they did, they would have caught it,” Newkirk said.
Who said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? How much would the CT scan have cost?
Smith ended up being taken to the hospital where she worked. A CT scan revealed multiple blood clots in her brain. Unfortunately, there was nothing doctors could do, and Smith was declared brain dead.
A mother and wife lost because the hospital wanted to skimp out on the diagnostic that might have saved her.
More than 90 days later, Smith’s family, including her young son, is still by her side as she remains on life support, but they say they weren’t given any say in her case because of Georgia’s heartbeat law. The law bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically around 6 weeks into pregnancy.
90 days out of a possible 220 or so days. How much has it cost to keep her alive since her brain death, and how much is it going to cost to keep her alive for 130 more days? And remember, it's not just $, but emotional health for her boyfriend, mother, son, and anyone else not mentioned/interviewed.
“She’s pregnant with my grandson, but my grandson may be blind, may not be able to walk, wheelchair bound. We don’t know if he’ll live once she has him,” Newkirk said. “It should have been left up to the family.”
And all of this for a baby that is likely to suffer major medical issues due to gestating in a brain-dead, possibly otherwise compromised body, hooped up on medication and other medical intervention to preserve the body's life long enough for the baby to be born, possibly severely compromised itself.
Newkirk says she wants people to understand the human toll of Georgia’s law and the emotional weight of being stripped of medical decision-making during a crisis.
But of course Cons don't give a shit about this. Woman dies, leaving behind a son, mother, boyfriend, and countless friends? Nah, that's not important. BABY MUST BE BORN, no matter how injured gestating in a body like that will make it, making the baby a burden on other people, because GAWD'S WILL and bullshit like that. :|
I've got some thoughts on this.
When I was learning about the world, some time in the early to mid 1980s, I learned something that was interesting to me. There was roughly 1 person for every year Earth existed. I also learned that that number was likely too high, and our life was about to get more complicated because too many of us were too hungry for the resources Earth had to offer.
But now, 40 years later, there is now almost TWO people for every year the Earth has existed. Now, every rare resource has two pops chasing after it. What's worse is everyone wants what they had in the 80s (a house, a car, a large yard, etc) without being willing to give up on any aspect of the dream. People who have houses fight against higher density housing. Cars get bigger, not smaller. And thus every individual consumes more than they did in the 80s.
What happens when supply goes down (because NIMBYism and rampant consumerism), while demand goes up (because there are now twice as many people chasing resources)? Look around you. Everything is expensive. Housing. Fuel. Food. Education. Healthcare. What could be done with a single income in the 80s now can't be done with two incomes today. World-wide, even. Japan, China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, and even China are suffering population growth rates falling below replacement rate because it's too fucking expensive to have a kid in this world. House ownership is a forgotten dream for young people these days, and even for me. I'm earning 6 figures these days, but even that's not enough to afford the down-payment on a house, especially with rents as crazy expensive as they are. Car ownership? In 2005, we looked at the costs of a car (not just the cost to own it, but the cost to maintain it, the cost to keep it fueled, the cost to drive it responsibly -- insurance, and the cost to store it) and decided it was too expensive to own a car or even lease a car. When we need a car these days, we rent one, and give it up gladly at the end. We don't run the AC in the heat of the day because electricity is too fucking expensive. And I don't know if the 15kg I've lost over the past 2 years was due to being disgusted with how expensive everything is, but...well, I am disgusted with how expensive food is. That's the one thing I can't escape.
I hear ya on the whole 'why did I bring kids into this world?!' A fun (?) thought exercise I like to do is consider what life would have been like had the wife and I had kids. Back in 2005, we were in a good place for having kids. She was working for CompUSA and I was working for Qwest, and our total income was 5x our rent, easily. We were finally settled down, and things were looking up for us. Then Hurricane Katrina hit.
Let me be clear. We were thousands of miles away from where Hurricane Katrina hit. New Orleans flooding did affect my wife as she has family down there, but even had Katrina made it to where we were, it'd just be a moderate rain event for us. But that didn't stop the massive corpo I worked for cashing in and cutting its workforce. We went from "you guys are doing a great job, we're going to hire you as regular IT guys" to "pack up your desks, you're done here" in less than a week. We went from on top of the world to filing for bankruptcy in 3 months. Had we had a kid in that time period, we'd likely have had to move back to Louisiana so the Grandparents could help with the kids while we went and worked minimum wage jobs just to try to keep a roof over our heads. I'm so glad we didn't, but that's a shame to poor 'Victoria', our hypothetical daughter who I would have liked to me. On the other hand, she'd likely have a touch of AuDHD like her mom and dad, meaning the next 4 years would have been hell on Earth thanks to Junior and his merry band of miscreants over at Dept. of Health. :|
None of this is to excuse the shitheads in the world. It's just...when you have twice the pops chasing half the resources, even the most well meaning of governments will be fighting rampant instability, which makes Authoritarianism look appealing.