Thoracic Jurisprudence
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008Large breasts are not a malady: that’s what we literally read as the headline of an on-line Der Spiegel article. (Yes, of another article from Der Spiegel; what we have here again is the dreaded serendipity effect, where I just happened to chance upon yet another interesting on-line article – it helps a lot when their headlines/links have particularly eye-catching language – as I originally zeroed-in on the Somali pirates piece that is the subject of the blogpost above.)
Well, who ever said that they were? Certainly no man, that’s for sure. But that’s not the point here; that headline would have been better phrased as “Large breasts are not an official malady,” that is, are not what a given nation’s national health system recognizes as something that it should step in to fix without charging the (unfortunate?) carrier of same. Here it is the German national health system that we’re talking about, of course, and Der Spiegel is simply passing along word of a decision from the Social Court of the German state Hesse that, if a certain anonymous woman (born in 1971) wants to go under the knife to have the size of her breasts reduced, she’s going to have to pay for it herself. (more…)
