There Has To Be An Easier Way To Keep Your Kid

In the movie “Parenthood”, Keanu Reeves manages to actually deliver a couple of lines without sounding like too much of a brain-dead clod. That’s probably why I vaguely remember that scene after all these years. It’s something to the effect of “You need a license to drive a car, hell, you even need a licence to fish. But they’ll let any blankety blank have a kid.” Of course, we’re all supposed to be struck by the Stoner Wisdom of Keanu and not think too hard about a world where they start requiring licenses for procreation. Because then nobody would make it to the teary scene at the end of the movie where Jason Robards raises his mixed-ethnicity grandson Cool when Amadeus skips out on the kid to avoid a gambling debt as they would all be busy making sure us libertarians in the audience were being properly defibrillated.

But that movie is about 15 years old, and in the intervening years we are growing ever closer toward the day when you will indeed need a license to be a parent. Of course, one of the ways you can currently be denied the opportunity to raise a child is by being obese. Apparently this dude is good enough to be a FOSTER parent, but not high enough quality to be allowed to keep the child. Now, all the facts aren’t in, and admittedly the fat fellow could also be running drugs or guns or women of ill repute on the side. For all I know he’s some sort of rotund Scarface sitting behind a mound of carbs at a table, brandishing a bottle of soda and seething “say hellooo to my leedle freen.” Surely the judge has other reasons for not allowing the man to formally adopt his biological cousin according to the wishes of the child’s own birth mother, right? I mean, you don’t keep a kid from loving parents because one of them is fat. RIGHT?

Oh well. I guess it doesn’t matter, because the guy is taking some doctor up on the offer of free weight loss surgery. Nice of the doctor, I suppose. However, I just can’t help but sit here and wonder

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH AMERICA?!?

Weight loss surgery is dangerous. 90% of the people who have it experience at least one form of complication. Many times that “complication” is DEATH.

There are online calculators which tell you how likely you are to die from the surgery. You know, just like “what will my mortgage payment be” or “how much money will I have to retire”. Plug in a few facts and you’ll see if you’re going to be the 1 in 20 who die from having your insides cut apart and rearranged. [1]

And that’s just the deaths. We’ve barely even talked about the forty percent (40%) who experience other complications within 6 months of surgery. Things like ulcers, malnutrition, dehydration, pneumonia and having hydrochloric acid from your stomach leak into your abdominal cavity and eat away at your other organs because the seal on the cut-up stomach didn’t take after the initial surgery. [2]

But I suppose if it’s either that or losing your baby, most folks would opt for the Cut-Gut Roulette any day. That’s one of the things that’s good about America. If you’re looking for the pony, that is.