The Breast Cancer Site

Every day I visit The [Good Cause] Site to click the giant button that gives free stuff to good causes.

"The Site" is really a series of six identical sites that each support a different cause: children's health care, literacy, animal rescue, feeding the hungry, fighting breast cancer, and saving the rainforest. Each site has a big button, and for every person that clicks that button, advertising sponsors will donate money to that particular cause (in exchange for your eyeballs on their ads). It's an easy way to take 20 seconds out of your day to help a good cause for free.

The part that I find particularly interesting is that, once you've clicked, along with a big patchwork of advertising you get to see how much "stuff" was funded by yesterday's clicks: 66192 cups of food for hungry people, 24990 bowls of food for rescued animals, etc. The numbers are usually around this order of magnitude; several thousand books donated, several thousand children vaccinated, etc. But when I started looking at the breast cancer numbers, I got a shock: consistently, about 5.5 free mammograms were funded per day for underprivileged women. Compared with 25000 bowls of food for animals!? Does that mean that people are over four thousand times more disposed to help animals than to help women get health care?

Of course, it dawned on me shortly afterwards that one mammogram is probably significantly more expensive than one bowl of cat food. This realization was borne out by their daily results page, which gives more detailed statistics including the number of clicks received per day for each cause. I guess it speaks well for people's priorities that more people are clicking on The Breast Cancer Site than on The Animal Rescue Site (not that you shouldn't click on all of the sites; but if you're going to pick one over another, I'd rather see people getting the care than animals).

I hope you join me in putting these sites in your browser's bookmarks, or on your daily calendar. It's an easy way to make a difference, at no cost to yourself.

Ashley the "pillow angel"

The big news item in Seattle lately has been Ashley. To quote the Seattle Times: "Ashley is a 9-year-old girl who has static encephalopathy, a severe brain impairment. She cannot walk or talk... She is fed with a tube." So her parents have decided to stunt her physical growth and sexual development with medical procedures including having "her uterus and breast tissue removed... and [receiving] large doses of hormones to halt her growth" (International Herald Tribune). They say that keeping her around 4'5" / 75 lbs. for the rest of her life will allow them to more easily pick her up, carry her around, and generally care for her and involve her in family activities.

But as you can imagine, news of the procedure has sparked a lot of controversy. Every medical ethicist and their mother has had something to say on the issue. Personally, I find it intriguing, and I'm still not sure what my opinion is. I don't feel I have the authority or the experience to categorically say either "That's outrageous!" or "What a good decision!" I've never had children to care for, let alone a disabled child, so all I'd be judging from would be my gut reaction to the idea of cutting the bits out of a young girl. But it's always so much more complex when you're involved, isn't it.

The parents make a pretty compelling and rational case for it on their blog. "Ashley's smaller and lighter size makes it more possible to include her in the typical family life and activities that provide her with needed comfort, closeness, security and love: meal time, car trips, touch, snuggles, etc." That totally makes sense to me. But they also say "A fundamental... misconception about the treatment is that it is intended to convenience the caregiver; rather, the central purpose is to improve Ashley's quality of life." But... isn't the latter objective achieved only through the former? If she grew to normal size—say 5'6", 125 lbs.—I'm sure they wouldn't just leave her locked in the attic and send up food three times a day. They'd still try to involve her w/ the family as much as possible. It would just be a lot harder for them. Like it or not, her quality of life is inherently determined by how high a quality of life her caregivers are able to provide for her. And if she were 125 lbs., it wouldn't be impossible for them to lift her or bring her along on trips... it would just be significantly more, well, inconvenient.

Which, of course, is part of why the case is so controversial. There's not a black-and-white case to say that it would be impossible to care for her without this treatment, or that she'd die. Yet (in my opinion) it's naïve to think that the parents are doing this lightly, without significant thought or medical and ethical consultation. I have no doubt that they're sincerely doing it because, first and foremost, they want to improve her quality of life. But they also achieve the (slight) simplification of their own lives in the process, thereby making it easy for everyone who doesn't have to care for Ashley themselves to jump in and criticize.

Not to sound too biblical, but judge not, lest ye be judged...