Kevin Miller responds to my article below.
Here are excerpts of his comments in italics. (You can read the entire thing in the link above.) My thoughts in regular print.
She next mentions that the girl can’t help with her own care, but can resist her caregivers. Again, I agree that this makes caring for her particularly challenging. This is why I agree that society should provide her parents with lots of help.
I’m just wondering about what the parents should do in the meantime, before society steps to the plate and “provides what it should.”
Not that I think that makes the act moral or immoral either way. I hear these arguments used in abortion debates all the time. I’m just saying that when used in the face of real people making real choices the argument about what should ideally happens is sort of…unsatisfying. Certainly it would be for the parents while they wait for eutopia to commence.
She next questions whether the girl was “mutilated,” as I said, since “neither the uterus or breasts are ‘essential’ body parts.” I think that she’s relying on an overly narrow sense of “essential.”
Essential means necessary. You don’t essentially need breasts or a uterus to live. Some women get them removed prophylactically to avoid a cancer risk. I don’t think we should stretch what the word means to fit a scenario where it is clearly out of place. These surgeries did not remove anything “essential.
The fact is that bodily growth and development to maturity are basic events in normal human life, and to prevent this from happening with a combination of hormonal and surgical treatments is therefore “mutilation.”
Well if that’s is argument for using the term mutilation – then I really have to disagree with it. Mutilation means to harm, to mar, it implies disrespect. This isn’t a body that is going to experience normal growth and development. For some reason her brain physiology will not allow that. So to alter parts of her physiology to accommodate that reality seems reasonable. Mark’s use of the word “mutilate” is an over-the-top attempt to support his point. It doesn’t work for me.
Finally, she speaks of the parents’ good intentions. But “mutilation” is intrinsically evil.
Agreed.
I do not agree that this was mutilation. Therefore I cannot agree that this is intrinsicially evil.
The rest of his point is a circular argument. It’s mutilation so it’s evil, it’s evil because it’s mutilation. It’s not persuasive.
Then another of Mark’s readers contributes this comment:
I am ticked off at the girl’s caregivers’ unwillingness to sacrifice on her behalf
I wonder it this person would be equally “ticked off” if they just left her as she was and stuck her in a Medicaid facility for the rest of her natural life. Is that more sacrificial? Better, holier? more moral than what they decided to do to keep her at home and part of their family, involved with their family life?
Whether or not her fertility or secondary sexual organs are an incumbrance to their daily lives is immaterial.
What if it is an incumbrance to her daily life?
The fact that they did decide to go through with such surgery is a grave evil against the girl as well as God’s gift of her sexuality, whether she can determine to use it as an adult or not.
Are prophylctic mastectomies and hysterectomies then also gravely evil? What am I missing here. Why is this evil?
The folks who seem to agree that these procedures were possibly permissible mirror a similar argument from not-necessarily well-meaning folks who advocated for sterilization for folks who had mental or other physical disabilities starting back in the 1920s and beyond.
Can you say “eugenics,” anyone?
Those sterilizations were done to prevent reproduction. That’s not the reason that Ashley’s parents did this. Ashley wasn’t sterilized with a tubal ligation. She had a hysterectomy to avoid the hygenic and pain control issues that go with menstruation. Their purpose was to be able to maintain her good health and hygiene as she matured and they aged, so that they could care for her as much as possible by themselves. It’s hardly the same thing and even an elementary look at their web site would have clarified that. The eugenics statement at the end clarifies that this commenter didn’t even bother to do basic research.
So we’re back to the circular argument. I’ll keep you posted on other discussions and web articles on this case.
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