News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
In this case, it might actually be okay if they're wrongly convicted and chemically castrated rather than executed as chemical castration can usually be reversed (you have to scroll down a bit, but it's mentioned).. It's not like you burn off anyone's genitals.
“Just hormones.”
Anyone who has ever seen someone on hormonal medication knows that it can profoundly change your outlook and personality. Even birth control can have emotional impacts on people, and they may not even notice it because the medication is so normalized that people don’t see it as a potential problem.
I edited that bit cos I knew someone would think that was my entire point. But as you said yourself "it CAN have" (emphasis mine) undesirable effects. Most medications, hormonal or not, CAN have these effects. But the vast majority of people on these medications don't get these effects. And even if every person who was chemically castrated suffered these effects (and again, they don't, we wouldn't use it to treat some diseases if it did), the fact it's reversible makes it infinitely better than the death penalty. Reality isn't perfect. There's always gonna be compromises.
My observation is that it seems like a significant percentage of people do experience the side effects, but either don’t connect the dots to the medication, or the benefit outweighs the problem. A quick google search has revealed that this is an issue that is getting increased attention over the last few years.
“The study of over a million Danish women over age 14, using hard data like diagnosis codes and prescription records, strongly suggests that there is an increased risk of depression associated with all types of hormonal contraception.
…the IUD was particularly associated with depression in all age groups is especially significant, because traditionally, physicians have been taught that the IUD only acts locally and has no effects on the rest of the body. Clearly, this is not accurate.”
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/can-hormonal-birth-control-trigger-depression-201610172517
“Among contraceptive users aged 15–49 in 2018, female permanent contraception was the most common method used (28%), followed by pills (21%), male condoms and IUDs (both 13%).”
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-method-use-united-states
I’ve been having a little trouble finding out how many women specifically in that range are sexually active, but I found a few articles that seem to show that the numbers for men and women are around 70% - 75%. For the sake of this post, I’m going to call it 72%.
I looked up the census data for 2018, which showed that there were 164,730,000 women living in the US at that time. 72% are likely to be sexually active, so that makes 118,605,600. Because I can’t be sure if they differentiated copper IUD’s from hormonal, we’ll just look at pills. 21% equals 24,907,176. About 2% of women in the Dutch study said they experienced depression from the pills, so that gives us 498,143.52—nearly half a million—women who are likely to be experiencing depression from pill form birth control alone. This number obviously increases when you include the other forms of hormonal birth control that I couldn’t calculate here, plus all the other forms of hormonal medication.
Not sure why you've posted all of this given I've not once mentioned hormonal contraceptives and there's not much data here to support your claim... 2% is an incredibly low number. Sure, when you have such a large population it involves a lot of people, but statistically, it's stupid low. You've also misinterpreted the data given a bit, the risk of depression when on a hormonal contraceptives was 2.2%. The risk of depression when not on one is 1.7%. Again, that affects a lot of people, but it's not the number you've calculated being caused by the contraceptive alone, and is still statistically very low. So, I'm just gonna completely ignore your anecdotal observations given at the start of your comment and rely on the hard data you've given. Which, admittedly, is only for one branch of hormonal medicine, but the data given does neatly support my claim that most people don't experience these wild side effects you initially ascribed to the treatments.
2 or 1% is a huge number when we are talking about hundreds of millions of people are you daft
An extra .5% is hundreds of thousands of people.
And the numbers are US only. There's other countries that have this type of medication available.
Statistically, no it's not. Sure, it covers a large number of individuals, but it covers so little of the total population that it's pretty insignificant. There are side effects that occur more frequently with these drugs, and we don't care much about them either cos they are so low. I mean, yeah treat those who do get side effects bu the STATISTICAL likelihood of that happening is so low, they aren't gonna pull the drug from the shelves. And I didn't say that none of the population who takes these drugs suffer mental side effects. I said most of them don't. And given the best counter argument I've been given is "2% of them do", well, I'm gonna stand by my original assertion. Also, your maths is way off. If 2% of the population is a little under half a million (and I haven't checked the other person's maths, but I skimmed it and it seemed fine so I have no reason to distrust it), then 0.5% of the population is not "hundreds of thousands of people". At most, it's a bit over 125k people...
And let's get back to why I said this. It's about chemical castration of convicted criminals (whether they are actually guilty is kinda immaterial, they're convicted and the point of doing this is so we don't kill them if they are actually innocent and can later prove it). When the fuck did we suddenly care that 2% of them might get depressed?! I guarantee being in prison raises their risk of depression by way more than 2%... I mean, I bet none of you expected that you were teeing off on a pathologist who can point out why you're wrong, but Jesus, how was this ever an issue? Like I said, 100% reversible (from a quick read of two papers, contraceptive depression gwnerally resolves upon cessation) and 100% preferable to executing an innocent person. Fuck me. You people are insane...
I'm not talking about punitive sterilization or the death penalty. I am talking about the economic burden of depression which is apparently quite a bit.
If it's so low, should the drug manufacturers make up this value and compensate these women? Or is it too much?
Women should have access to safe and effective birth control, without gambling on burdening themselves. Having bodily autonomy is a part of equal rights, and this attitude that the current solutions are 'safe enough it's fine' is misogynistic.
Yeah, but I'm not. I was talking about how using hormones might be okay in this one instance. I couldn't give two shits about hormonal contraception and it's consequences for women at this time as it's completely irrelevant to my point. I will say this much though, one, your second paragraph is so poorly worded it makes literally no sense. And two, you aren't as smart as you think you are if you think this is what makes the medical system mysognistic. The whole thing is set up to favour white men. This is a tiny drop in the bucket as to how fucked the whole system is. Cos an incredibly low number of women, statistically, getting depressed when using one form of medication is nothing compared to how many of them die of easily treated heart conditions, as just one example.
Can we get back to the point now? The one that chemical castration is maybe okay as a punishment cos it's reversible?
Nah maiming people isn't on the table. Bye.
What the fuck. Literally not maiming them. 100% reversible. Nothing is cut off of them. It also says a lot that you can't speak to the other points I raised too. You're a white knight who is out of their depth. Fuck off and annoy someone else...
I did my best with the resources I had to come up with something more concrete than asserting that it is or isn’t a problem without anything to back it up. I may have made some errors, but the fact remains that there was a significant amount of recent information about the growing awareness of hormonal medication side effects.
I bet it doesn’t feel statistically insignificant when it is happening to you and people won’t believe you due to the perceived rarity of side effects.
And, finally returning to where we started, all of this is simply to say that I don’t think we should be imposing hormone meds as a punishment for anything.
Oh spare me, I have a half dozen conditions ranging from annoying to life threatening with less chances of happening than your 0.05%. I know exactly what it's like to be "statistically insignificant". Changes nothing. You treat the majority. Not the minority. And when a side effect causes a a 0.05% increase? Yeah, don't worry about it. I mean, don't suddenly not be a doctor and not treat those affected, but given how 99.95% of the population are aided by it and don't suffer the side effect, then maybe still use it? Like, what the actual fuck. I just don't get why you came into this spouting off all this shit you didn't understand. Like, how do you think that "there was a significant amount of recent information" about this issue? Cos you sure didn't show it. And we've known about it for quite a while, a search on scholar.google shows that. All it means is it that drs should be aware that we may need to treat depression for a really small cohort of our contraceptive patients. Thats it. But go on, sy something dumb again...
And don't come at me with this "I did my best with my resources" malarkey. I literally used the resources you said you used to prove you wrong. You tried to be smart. You got caught out. Take the L and walk it off.
And given you don't have any idea how they work or with what incidence their side effects affect the general population, I'll kindly ignore your opinion on the matter in the final paragraph. Especially cos I'm not a mad fan of it too, but because you goddamn anti science activists wanna make a thing out of it for completely incorrect reasons, here I am...
I see we’ve reached the end of this conversation. Hope your day gets better.
Ahhh, so you just give up when proven wrong. Strong move. Bet it's served you well in life.
And my day is fine. Been drinking beers and smoking weed for 5hrs now cos I have literally nothing to do tomorrow but sleep til my new years party tomorrow. 8ts cute that you think you've bothered me though. I mean, come on, I've had more intelligent convos with my mates 3yo...
Well, maybe try some chemical castration? It's not that serious, as I have heard
Not sure what your point is since I know a few people who the treatment has literally saved their lives. I'd happily see them do it again, and I know they would do it again too. So, yeah, I'd 100% do it if the need arose. I literally take medications with way more side effects and long term health risks than chemical castration every day of my life right now. Which I'm okay with, cos I'm alive cos of them. So, yeah, might wanna try another angle of attack for this "genius" reply of yours.
And like I initially said, this could be a viable alternative in this very specific circumstance. That circumstance being "not killing someone who could be innocent". But everyone seems to have latched onto "drugs bad" and they a) don't understand how relatively benign the drugs are, and b) seem to be forgetting that I was literally saying it might actually be okay for us to do it to convicted rapists instead of executing them.
I guess we're all going to slide past the gen pop as a shortcut to capital punishment. Makes the chemical castration kind of irrelevant, doesn't it?