Monday, November 26, 2012

Your Body, Your Choice…To Die

In a sad, yet not altogether surprising case, an obese woman died in Hungary because she couldn’t get plane ride back for medical treatment:

A sickly, obese Bronx woman was left stranded in Hungary then died from kidney failure after airline officials booted her from three New York-bound flights because she was too fat, her husband says.

“All we wanted was to come back home to get her treatment,” said a grieving Janos Soltesz, a Staten Island Ferry security guard whose 56-year-old wife, Vilma, died in Hungary nine days after she was kicked off the first of three jets.

Vilma, who weighed about 425 pounds, had only one leg and used a wheelchair. She traveled with her husband of 33 years to Hungary on Delta and KLM airlines on Sept. 17.

They spent several relaxing weeks at a vacation home they owned in the Hungarian countryside. It was a trip they took almost every year.

Before the journey, their travel agent informed Delta of Vilma’s condition and bought two tickets for her and one for Janos.

They planned to come home Oct. 15 so Vilma could resume treatment with the doctors she had been seeing for years.

I’m sorry, but I have little sympathy for this women, but not because she was obese.  The reason I don’t feel any sympathy for her is because she traveled abroad knowing she had a serious medical condition and ended up unable to get it.

Your body is your property (at least, that is one of the libertarian/anarchist/feminist/Objectivist creeds) and as such, you are responsible for how you take care of it.  While other people have no right to take your life from you, unless you were trying to kill them yourself, you have the responsibility to keep yourself alive and no one else does.

I don’t know the exact circumstances of how this woman got to be 425 pounds, which is the size of about five supermodels, but I imagine she did not take good care of herself (and that’s putting it mildly).  In spite of this and in spite of her own medical condition, she ended up on the other side of the world, away from the very aid that would have saved her life, of her own free will.

You cannot help the body you were born with.  But you are responsible for it.  Apparently, Vilma decided to go along with her husband to Hungary and paid with her life.  It is tragic, but I cannot feel any sympathy for her or her husband in this matter.

And yes, I am not lost on the irony that an obese woman traveled to a country named “Hungary” and died there (for those who translate my blog, in English, the country “Hungary” sounds like “Hungry”).