All those eating badly and dying of disease are pumping up a medical industry to learn all the answers to that should a disease strike a healthy person, the remedy has been discovered.

At least I figure this is the thought process of the elites. It is a sad thought process but one that reflected the cutthroat atmosphere of this country.

Oh come on, I think that's taking cynicism too far, and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool cynic, AND I work with doctors every day. Doctors and medical researchers are, for the most part, a group of people who really do mean well and want to help their patients live better lives. I'm sure there are doctors out there who are nothing more than greedy bastards willing to sacrifice the *actual* well-being of their patients for the sake of ordering another MRI or series of $300 specialist visits so they can buy a third Lexus, but I suspect those are the outliers.

Most of them are just really, really interested in how the human body works. Lumping them together as "the medical industry" is unfair. I'm particularly interested in nutrition, but not because I want to make a million dollars on the back-fat of people who eat Doritos and don't exercise. I'm interested because Type II Diabetes is eating my family alive, and the way the human body responds to and interacts with food has recently become very interesting to me. So, I want to study it.

Which leads me to my next point, why are there not about 10 times as many organic and healthy restaurants being opened up by eager entrepreneurs? Heck, have only half the menu organic so you can feed the dumbkopfs too and supplement the businesses' income.

In order to provide fresh, unprocessed, unpreserved food, you have to buy in small batches because it will spoil quickly if it is not consumed right away by your patrons. Smaller batches mean higher costs, since you lose all the economy of scale that you gain when you can buy say a three-gallon vat of mayonnaise and keep it in the storage closet before you open it, instead of making your own with some fresh eggs and a little oil, having to immediately refrigerate it, and then use it all before it goes bad. Also, nearly everything is going to have to be refrigerated to keep from spoiling since the amount of preservatives would be small to none. That is going to increase the costs in a multitude of ways: building space for walk-ins and reach-ins, freezer space, the equipment itself, and the electricity to run it. Additionally, you will now need more prep workers on your line to make things (like the aforementioned mayonnaise) on the day of service, and repeatedly, if you want to keep the tables turning with the same speed that you do when you are able to rely on prepared foods.

I'm not trying to make facile excuses, there really is serious money involved; you would have to charge an absolute fortune if you wanted to stay profitable, and with a readily available Subway down the block where I can get a chicken breast on whole wheat with a huge pile of veggies at no extra charge for $3, I'll probably pick the Monsantoriffic Subway. That's my economic reality.

The other thing, why are there not awesomely huge class action suits being lobbed at these punk corporations? Certainly you or I could not pull these stunts on the populace.

You have to be able to demonstrate that the companies knowingly provided false information to their customers, and/or colluded to prevent their customers from obtaining information about their products on their own.

The Burger King class action suit in NY a few years ago went nowhere, and rightly so given the argument they presented, which was that the consumers had no idea that eating Whoppers every day would make them fat. The fact is, the calorie count of a Whopper is available online, and its also available *at Burger King*. Information about calorie intake:calorie output and weight gain is widely available across many different media. The plaintiff's argument was bogus on its face.

However, the judge left a really interesting door open, to wit: he said a reasonable person has enough information to determine that eating cheeseburgers every day with mayonnaise on them will cause them to become fat. HOWEVER: if what the restaurant was serving the patrons was *not* what they understood it to be, then that same reasonable person is no longer able to make judgments about their own consumption. In other words, if what the fast food chains and processed food corporations are serving is *not* actually chicken or beef, but is some product that has been so overly-processed that its makeup can no longer be considered "chicken" or "beef" -- but is still being sold that way -- the consumers are actively being deceived, and their avenues of information-seeking have been effectively blocked because they don't actually *know* what they are eating and can't make any inferences about how their bodies will react to it.

I was talking about first trimester options for both parents. It's ridiculous to call the first trimester bundle o' cells a "child." It's a potential child, yes, but the right to privacy and the supreme court say it's not, yet, a child, and most reasonable people agree.

During the first trimester, the blobular bundle o' cells doesn't have any rights to give up. If the blob evolves into a baby and is born, then it has the same rights as every other child, including support from both parents.

Your termination of "parental rights" during the first trimester is a non-starter, since there no parental rights -- or responsibilities -- (yet) to terminate. What you are, practically speaking, asking to do is pro-actively terminate the rights of that child upon birth, which is what I am saying you can't do since they're not your rights to terminate.