*blinks*

[conuly]

Mostly, I agree with this article. Good stuff. But...

"I got married really young because I really wanted a family," Fisher said, "and I also knew I was going to die young."

Fisher married at 21, had a baby at 22 and was battling breast cancer by 31. She's been in remission for 12 years, but is fighting a new battle.


You have an inheritable problem that predisposes you to cancer. You arranged your life around this. There is no benefit from this, and the odds are that you'll die young. So you got married early to have kids?

Genetic testing revealed that her daughter, Kate, has the BRCA-1 gene, which is associated with colon and breast cancers.

I don't want to say anything I don't mean, so listen carefully. I don't think this woman or her daughter would've been better off, or the daughter (or woman) hadn't been born. I think people need a lot of education about various disabilities before saying "oh, this kid might have *blank*, I should get an abortion". But in this case, she knows the problems involved in this, they're not pretty... *shrugs* I would've adopted, that's all.

Comments

[latenightparty.livejournal.com]

So were they over 50-50, I wonder?

[conuly]

You want a 50% chance before you'll take precautions against an early death?

The risk of getting ovarian cancer if a woman has a marker for a mutation is 40 percent, Weber said, compared to 1 percent if they are removed. Once a woman gets the cancer, there is an 80 percent to 85 percent chance of dying, she said.

She had, apparently, a 40% chance of getting ovarian cancer. This is in addition to the increased likelihood of other types of cancer.