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

[Donna Hill]

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

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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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