[stylist] anybody else watch tonight's law and order, discuss?

Mon Dec 1 15:36:14 UTC 2008

Those are some good points.  And I agree we have more palpable fish to fry. 
But hopefully not many watched it or got a wild idea in their head.  They 
had a good reason but what do you bet the first person who really fights for 
this does it because they just don't want to deal with a large person who 
hurts people.

Barbara
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Donna Hill" <penatwork at epix.net>
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 12:22 PM
To: "NFBnet Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] anybody else watch tonight's law and order, discuss?

> JC,
> My husband and I saw the Law and Order episode last night, and I'm afraid 
> we had the opposite reaction you did.  I bristle when the government or 
> anyone in authority forces their beliefs down the throats of people who 
> are trying their best to deal with a situation that is forced upon them by 
> no fault of their own, a situation which is an ongoing strain on every 
> resource they possess and which the authority figure has no clue about.
> The child in this episode had no hope of ever walking, talking or living 
> anything close to a normal life.  The procedure the family wanted and 
> which some doctors were willing and legally permitted to do would have the 
> negative consequences of pain for the child and a protracted recovery as 
> well as the uncertainty of the long-term effects of hormone therapy.  On 
> the other hand, allowing her to grow to maturity as her parents age would 
> ensure that at some point she would be too hard for them to physically 
> handle resulting in her needing to be institutionalized.  The short-term 
> pain and the uncertainty of long-term effects of medication -- which 
> anyone who takes any medication faces, whether they know it or not -- are 
> offset in the parents' thinking by what may be decades of time for the 
> child to remain at home with people who are clearly portrayed as loving 
> her and doting on her.
>
> The complication that the writers used to make it a L & O episode in the 
> first count and to sway the audience toward the perspective of the ADA 
> Cutter was that the mother had pushed her nanny, who disagreed with the 
> procedure on moral grounds, into a swimming pool knowing that she couldn't 
> swim.  The woman had a rare reaction in which she effectively drowned 
> later and ended up in a coma.
>
> Though many parents must face extraordinary choices and difficult 
> decisions with regard to profoundly disabled children, I doubt that even 
> one in a million tries to drown anyone over it.  That plot and the initial 
> erroneous assumption that the nanny and husband were having an afair draw 
> our attention away from sympathy for the family and the fact that in some 
> cases, there are no good choices, no choices that come without severe 
> negatives.  Society, IMO, should support people in whatever decisions they 
> make on such matters and stop preying on the people who have the greatest 
> burdens.
> In the end, the sensabilities of McCoy and the judge won out, but the 
> system is to be condemned for making the family's decision about the 
> medical procedure part of the legal case to begin with.  McCoy's apology 
> to the family should have been accompanied by at the very least, the money 
> necessary to pay the extra attorney's fees that his office caused the 
> family by doing so.
>
> this rediculous, inhumane and barbaric propensity of society to victumize 
> victums and to set up bureaucracies as more capable of deciding what is 
> good for a person or family than the people themselves is a barrier to 
> free thought and an unpleasant reminder of how savage we as humans can 
> still be.
>
> With regard to making it an NFB issue ... IMO we should be focusing on 
> blind people.  With two-thirds of working age, otherwise able-bodied blind 
> Americans unemployed and only ten percent of blind kids being taught to 
> read Braille, taking up the cause of profoundly disable people, for whom 
> there is currently no adaptive equipment or technology, proven success 
> strategies or role models who have overcome their limitations, dilutes our 
> message and thwarts our purpose.
> Donna
>
> -- 
> For my bio & to hear clips from The Last Straw:
> http://cdbaby.com/cd/donnahill
>
> Apple I-Tunes
>
> phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=259244374
>
> Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
> www.padnfb.org
>
>
>
>
>
> James Canaday M.A. N6YR wrote:
>> dear list members,
>> I'll try to find an NBC summary of tonight's plot.  but in tonight's 
>> episode a couple with a severely disabled child planned to have their 
>> child surgically and hormonally prevented from growing up.  that, so that 
>> she would be easier to care for, and to avoid  certain complications.
>>
>> the Judge, and Jack Maccoy (now the D.A.) held that it was not the 
>> state's place to condemn this behavior.  The judge cited the Fourteenth 
>> Amendment.  and the assistant D.A. named Cutter, said (I think rightly 
>> so) that because the daughter is disabled did not mean that the parents 
>> had the right to maim their daughter  he was overruled.  my wife was in 
>> tears at the end, and I was shouting at the TV, at the end.
>>
>> we've discussed whether to talk about this episode with the national NFB, 
>> and whether to call local affiliates of NBC.
>>
>> so, I just wondered if any of you saw it too.
>> thanks,
>>
>> jc
>>
>> Jim Canaday M.A.
>> Lawrence, KS
>>
>>
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