I read this story a couple days ago, and I was like, yeah, that's one of the more messed up things I've read in awhile. I was thinking, damn, I make jokes about genetically engineering girls' height to keep them short, but I have problems and here's someone actually doing it, only after the fact.

And of course, I was about to write a post full of all kinds of half-assed, poorly thought out, and completely unqualified opinions about it. I gave up on that route after reading an excerpt from the parents' blog explaining things, and I was like, forget it. Virtually none of us really do have any clue as to what it would be like to have to go through that and make those kinds of decisions. Doesn't make it all right or wrong; this one is about as gray as it gets.

Being me, though, there are still a couple of things that really piss me off that I will comment on. One is the fact that the parents have a fucking blog despite saying they want to remain anonymous. Someone will figure how who they are pretty quickly if they haven't already. Sure, we could come up with several possible reasons, good and bad, why they're blogging anyway, but the inconsistency is irritating. And then there's this:

In a related conversation with Ashley's doctor, Ashley's mom came upon the idea of accelerating her already precocious puberty to minimise her adult height and weight.

Okay, look, the field of medicine really is all guesswork in a white coat, but this still irks the hell out of me to have parents coming up with medical treatments and doctors letting parents tell them what to do. Sure, they put it before a panel of, like, a billion doctors, but on principle it just doesn't sit right with me. It's like when Bill Maher was commenting on all those drug commercials which urge people to "tell your doctor" about pharmaceutical X: "At that point isn't he just... A dealer?"