Most people that know me hopefully see me as jovial for the most part. I pray I am slow to anger and generally cheerful. Every once in a while, though, I see something that upsets me.

Last week I read a story about a girl in Philadelphia that angered me. I am truly irate. My jaws were sore on Saturday morning from clenching my teeth all day Thursday and Friday. Even after trying to give myself some time to cool down, I am certain that I can’t. See, this little girl was denied a kidney transplant because she was mentally disabled, and I cannot keep silent about that. It’s a blatant slap in the face of civil rights.

Why is this important to MPAs? I have said on several occasions that MPAs, because of our role in society, need to be civil role models as well as corporate role models. That is, we need to go vote, volunteer, etc. Our actions need to reflect the values we hold. It would be hard to look up to someone in the boardroom when you knew that that person was slime when he left the office.

For me, this is no exception. It would be difficult for me to stand by passively on a topic too close to my heart with such a responsibility on my shoulders. So here it goes:

Amelia Rivera

Amelia Rivera is three years old and has Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. She needs a kidney transplant within a year, to live. However, a doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (“CHOP”) told her parents that she could not receive a kidney transplant there because she was “mentally retarded” and because of her “quality of life.” More upsetting is the fact that when her parents told the doctor that they would try to find a donor on their own, the doctor insisted that he still would not perform the transplant.

This is clearly discrimination against those with mental disabilities. Even while I am cautious to go to an extreme on this issue, it seems that there was no other rationale from this doctor to deny this child her right to live. Had several other reasons been given for this child to be denied her kidney, I may have been more understanding. As it is, I am not at all understanding.

Freedom

What makes this so obvious for me that this is discrimination is the fact that Amelia’s parents offered to find a donor for their daughter. If they had, what would have been the harm in performing the transplant procedure? It’s not like they requested it be done for free. Thus, this fails a test for what I might call economic freedom.

Economic freedom has nothing to do with finances but, rather, with behavior. Over-generalized, economic freedom means that your outcomes are decided by choices. As John Smith would say, “He who does not work, will not eat,” and accordingly your choices today may have serious repercussions on the generations that succeed yours. (Freedom is neither starting at the same starting point nor ending at the same ending point; freedom has more to do with how much of the track you want to cover when you run the race.) However, there are attributes that we possess that we may not have the ability to choose, such as ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation and, in this case, mental and physical disabilities.

Civil freedom is necessarily violated when economic freedom is infringed. For example, if I am trying to buy a house and the real estate agent won’t sell me one, this may or may not be due to denial of freedom. However, if my finances are in order and the agent tells me she doesn’t sell to men, then my economic freedom, and therefore civil freedom, has been robbed. Here’s why: the agent isn’t evaluating me based on the choices I have made, but instead on my gender, which is something I cannot control nor was the result of a choice of a past generation. Thus, economic freedom is civil freedom, and it follows that discrimination as we know it is a loss of economic freedom.

Manacles

When that doctor at CHOP informed Amelia’s parents that he would not approve of the transplant even if they found their own donor, it is clear that economic gain or loss was not motivating his decision. Instead, he made a judgment about what he considered to be “quality of life” when it was not his place to do so. Amelia’s prospects were not decided based on her parents’ ability to pay, but instead on a judgment based on an intangible that Amelia herself was unable to avoid. He took away their economic freedom, placed them all in manacles, and threw them in Pandemonium to suffer. This doctor’s verdict needs to be overturned by someone.

The Keys

MPAs, especially future auditors like me, have a responsibility. The inherent nature of our jobs is to represent the public in what we do, ensuring that investors and creditors have the best information with which to manage enormous amounts of financial capital. Essentially, we are enhancing the ability to make decisions and choices better with what we do. It is like we are the keys that unlock a drawer that may or may not have a secret inside it.

It is because of this desire to stand up for investors, who are seeking the right to make well-informed decisions with their capital, that I must stand up for this child. As an auditor, it is my responsibility to be the voice for those who otherwise would not have one. Just as an everyday father who owns 200 shares in a stock effectively has no voice, Amelia Rivera equally has no voice with which she can effectively assert her right to live.

Final Thoughts

And that is why I write today. I had a lot of conversationalia prepared for this post. My outrage and furor fueled this instead. Sometimes, there are more important things to write about.

In the name of freedom, Amelia must not be robbed of her right to live because of her mental disability. In the name of human dignity, don’t let a disease she did not ask for be the reason be the cause of her life being valued or viewed any differently.