"We know we can save this child’s life. We can’t give up on this child," hospital president Peter Fitzgerald told CBC Hamilton.Wait for it...
The girl’s doctors said she has a 90-95 per cent chance of survival on chemotherapy, but that they didn’t know of anyone who had survived Acute Lyphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) without the treatment.Whaddayamean... political pawn?
The decision was met with applause from many in the courtroom, including members of the girl’s family.Yeah... "aboriginal rights"... that'll really perk up the eulogy.
“It is dismissed. It is dismissed … aboriginal rights are upheld,” said a family friend, in tears, as she called the girl’s mother from inside the courtroom.
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RELATED: Let's do the math
“We do have a disproportionate number of aboriginal children in the care of the state and many of them are in non-aboriginal homes,” said Milne. “Upholding the aboriginal rights in this kind of a context really also will speak to those kinds of cases too.”The first part of that statement is, in fact, quite accurate.
"Almost half of all children living in foster care in 2011 were Aboriginal."How this decision will speak to those cases completely eludes me. Again... let's look at the numbers...
"The rate of deaths from injuries is 3 to 4 times higher for Aboriginal children than for other children in Canada."I'm not sure that "appalling" begins to address that horrific statistic. The fact is, treating leukemia with locally-sourced tubers and a sense of cultural superiority is just the topmost layer of this ethocentric fruitcake.
Source: Government of Canada (2002) Healthy Canadians – A Federal Report on Comparable Health Indicators 2002. Ottawa: Health Canada.
Equally important... how does this decision not set a legal precedent allowing Muslims to perform clitorectomies on their daughters? Will African immigrants with established tradition be allowed to kill persons they identify as witches?
Should we make changes to the criminal code to accommodate Papuan cannibalism, or enfranchise Japanese ritual suicide?
The mind boggles.
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LAST WORD: A massage parlour is good enough...
...for Jack Layton...
Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach, Florida is a licensed massage establishment. The family has paid $18,000 to the institute (as has another First Nations family whose daughter, Makayla, was “cured” of leukemia but is now said to be in critical condition.)I got nuthin.