Perhaps you have heard about Ted Cruz’s critique of modern media at the last Republican Primary Debate. His comments were spot on with a little bit of humor thrown in.
“Let me say something at the outset,” the Senator from Texas said. “The questions asked in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media. This is not a cage match. And you look at the questions — Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues.”
“Do we get credit for this one,” the moderator, Quintanilla asked Cruz?
“And Carl, I’m not finished yet. The contrast with the Democratic debate, where every thought and question from the media was, which of you is more handsome and why?” Cruz asked and then paused to cough.
“You have 30 seconds left to answer should you choose to do so,” Quintanilla told the candidate.
“Let me be clear,” Cruz said. “The men and women on this stage have more ideas, more experience, more common sense, than every participant in the Democratic debate. That debate reflected a debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Nobody believes that the moderators have any intention of voting in a Republican primary. The questions being asked shouldn’t be trying to get people to tear into each other, it should be what are your substantive solutions to people at home,” Cruz said before getting cut off.
While watching this debate one could not miss the moderators’ rudeness and that they seemed to be on the attack more than the previous debates. They kept interrupting and not letting candidates finish answering questions. Their tones seemed hostile at certain points. At the end of the night the debate was not between the candidates themselves but between the moderators and the candidates. Ted Cruz was not trying to vilify the commentators unjustly, he was pointing out that they were not doing their jobs. When you have a job that expects you to be unbiased as well as professional and you are neither, how can you be trusted? The answer is simple, you cannot be.
There is a greater lesson here than one merely concerned with politics and the media. It is undeniable that for certain jobs trust is a premium component. Some examples immediately coming to mind are hairdressers, babysitters, interpreters, pilots, and doctors. With hairdressers it’s just trusting them with your hair; however, with doctors you are trusting them with your life. Doctors are supposed to be champions of life, they are supposed to help people stay alive and be well.
Slowly though, one has to wonder what is happening in the present modern day medical field. On pro-life news sites it is not at all uncommon for there to be stories of how doctors told women to abort their babies for “health” reasons and then the women do not follow their doctors advice and keep their babies. Those babies turn out to be miracles of happiness for their families.
A recent story is of a baby boy named Freddie. The baby, doctors predicted, would have birth defects or would not even survive the birth. They pressured Freddie’s mother to abort him.
“Right up to 29 weeks they were trying to make me get rid of him because they said he would not survive,” Dickinson said. “It got to the stage where I didn’t want to go to anti-natal classes because I knew they would keep trying to convince me to have an abortion.”
On September 26th Freddie turned one and defied all of the doctors predictions; he can crawl, talk, and feed himself. Freddie is a healthy baby and if his mother Stacey Dickinson had given in to doctors’ pressures he would never have had the chance to reach all those milestones and bring joy to his parents. Doctors pressuring women to have an abortion seems so counterintuitive. True there are doctors who perform abortions, nevertheless that does not change the fact that killing is contrary to the nature to what a doctor is supposed to stand for.
Another recent story is about William Skidelsky and his wife, Gudrun from the UK. Pregnant at 22 weeks, their unborn baby was diagnosed with a cleft lip and palate. At first they thought it was simply a treatable diagnosis then they talked to a senior doctor who gave them another perspective.
“Of course, you can go and see the cleft nurse,” he began, “and she will show you pretty before and after pictures and tell you that everything will be OK. But let me tell you what it’s really like.” He launched into a litany of potential problems. There would be endless operations, the likelihood of ostracisation, bullying, low self-esteem. The shape of the face could be affected, with the entire upper jaw recessed. Breastfeeding would be impossible, since the gap in our son’s palate meant that he wouldn’t be able to suck. Later, there would be problems with food coming out of the nose. “It will be disgusting,” the doctor said, and used his hands to mimic the motion of food exiting the nose. “Your son may speak with a funny voice, a biiit liiiiike thiiiis” – and here he did a pantomime impression of someone with a severe speech defect, all hyper-nasality and elongated vowels. “You are both attractive people,” he concluded. “You could start again. You need to go away, drink a bottle of wine and think about this very, very carefully.”
Afterwards, reeling from his bluntness, we headed outside the hospital’s main entrance for some fresh air. A few minutes later, the doctor came out. As he walked past us, he stopped. “There’s one more thing,” he said. “People who have clefts, when they have children and it’s discovered that their children have clefts, in most cases, they decide not to go ahead with the pregnancy.” As he made his way to his car, this final sally hung in the air. There seemed little doubt as to what he thought…(O)ur trust in him, I came to realize, was misplaced. The fact that he was an expert in prenatal scanning didn’t mean that he had a better idea than we did about what being the parent of a child with a cleft actually involved. He knew about the potential problems – but had no sense of the reality. Perhaps his outlook was connected to his background, his experience. Had a lifetime in fetal scanning, searching for defects, made him unusually intolerant of imperfection?
This doctor was not seeing a person rather he was seeing an imperfection; the doctor’s view of life greatly affected this couple. They became doubtful and considered getting an abortion. In the end they chose life for their son Hugo. If the people trusted to save and take care of human lives do not have the upmost value for life can they be trusted? Can they be trusted if they advise you to end a baby’s life? When saving a life becomes less of a big deal during pregnancy how long before it becomes less of a big deal when the patient is at a later age? When doctors do not value life there are greater ramifications besides a loss of trust, there are ramifications of unnecessary lost lives.
Ted Cruz held the media accountable on Wednesday, October 28th. While doctors probably won’t be involved in presidential debates (unless you’re Ben Carson) we can still find other ways to hold doctors accountable if need be. Nevertheless, let’s hope the day never comes where hairdressers are universally more trustworthy than doctors.
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