BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Tuesday, September 02, 2003
The wages of short stature.
Virginia Postrel has an
essay in the current New
York Times Magazine about the recent decision by the FDA to allow
healthy but constitutionally short children to be treated with
synthetic human-growth hormone.
Postrel, who writes a
weblog
that's popular among the libertarian set, seems to be saying several
provocative things, if I'm following her argument
correctly:
- Conditions that are problematic
but are not diseases (such as short stature) should be thought
about in different terms. People should be allowed to seek out
treatment (or not) without stigma, but without any claim on the
rest of us, either (i.e., no insurance
coverage).
- The marketplace naturally
favors certain types of people -- not just those who are smart,
pleasant, and honest, but also those who are tall and
good-looking.
- Banning employers from
discriminating on the basis of height or attractiveness is a
"slippery slope" that will eventually lead to your neurosurgeon
having been chosen on the basis of a lottery.
- Therefore, growth-hormone
treatments are a perfectly normal response for parents seeking to
give their kids a leg up in an increasingly competitive
culture.
Postrel leaves out some crucial
information.
For decades, hGH was given to
children with a type of dwarfism known as growth-hormone deficiency.
(I'm talking about actual dwarfism, which results in a stature
considerably shorter than what Postrel is writing about.)
But as I note in my forthcoming
book, Little
People: Learning to See the World Through My Daughter's
Eyes, hGH, originally
derived from cadavers, resulted in some people's
contracting
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the
human variant of mad-cow disease. Read
this Mother Jones report.
Synthetic hGH isn't nearly as dangerous;
yet the possibility exists that its use leads to a
higher incidence of cancer,
according to this BBC report.
Postrel appears to suggest that it
makes more sense to give kids shots to make them taller than it is to
outlaw discrimination against short people. She needs to think
again.
posted at 8:27 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
