t: "If_ we can reasonably predict that a woman's physical and emotional health is being destroyed by the demands of childbearing, u: And we cannot. Her OBGYN does that with greater or lesser degrees of error, and almost always it is greeter error rather than lesser error. t: _and_ _if_ we can determine that she feels under u: Keep in mind that we do not know the sources of this pressure to have children because we do not know, based on the limited data given, the reasons for her husband's insitence nor what part his insistence actually plays in her experience of being pressured. At least we do not know this based on the limited data given so far, which must, of course, be limited in order to protect patient confidentiality. t: it isn't stepping over the bounds of common sense and u: It isn't stepping over the bound of common sense, but common sense is a notoriously unreliable guide to making accurate predictions. Moreove, there is no empirical data anywhere in the literature of psychology that gives us a basis to make such a prediction more accurately than common sense could. Even if there were such emprirical data, it would not be likely to better than the data that now exists showing us how accurate such kinds of predictions can be---not very accuate by a long shot!! The kinds of predictions you speak of are guesswork. And when they are not guesswork but instead are based on data, they are useful mostly for prdicting group trends and not for predicting individual cases. Such predictions in individual cases are common sense and do not require professional opinion any more than the opinion of an intelligent layperson, for all such predictions are guesses, speculation, at this stage in the evolution of sceintific predictability in psychology. t: she will feel increasingly alone and desperate and may consider measures that we would all like to u; I don't know what measures you are fantasizing, but I am sure they are your fantasies since I know there is no scientific evidence to permit such predictions. Even the very best predictions that psychology can make based on evidence always must allow a wide margin of error. We are amazed because we don't know what predicts what and because we know that the most dire things that happen happen rarely. In fact, that's partly why we call them dire (they are so rare). We are amazed because we are confronted with our own true ignorance that we wish we did not have about rare events that are nonetheless problematic events. Predicting rare events, whether or not they are problematic, is more unlikley to be accurrate than predicting commonplace events. Commnplace events are easiy to predict accurately because they are commonplace. If you want to predict a rare event you absolutely must meet two criteria: (1) you must have a predictor that occurs almost never with any other event except with the event you are predicting and (2) you must have a predictor that occurs very, very often with the predicted event. That's the way prediction works for rare events. Can't be helped. There is no recourse. If you are predicting a rare event, by evidnece or by common-sense guesswork, you should place confidence in your prediction of a rare evenr only if the predictor occurs very, very often with the precise event you are predicting and only if the predictor occurs almost never with any other event except the one you are predicting. So for your prediction to be trustworthy that something dire will happen to this lady, you should be using a predictor that occurs almost never with any event except with the event you are predicting and it must be a predictor that we find very, very often with the event you are predicting. We are amazed when rare dire things happen because we of course don't expect rare events; if we did, they wouldn't be rare. And we don't expect them because we have almost no useful information to use as accurate predictors to even approximate anything remotely resembling an accuate prediction. Of course we have guesses, and so do laypersons. And there IS abundant hard evidence that laypersons' guesses are no more or less accurate than professionals' in these or other situations that professional therapists are called upon to predict or that they predict on their own with hardly any evidence for such predictions. But we are all sure we should have been predictive geniuses when we find ourselves with our notoriously fallacious 20-20 hindsight.
unremitting pressure to bear children,
ethical behavior to present to the couple the likely scenario of the future.
prevent but which always amaze us for some reason when we read about them.
When bad things happen that amaze us, the amazement is not so easily explained away as you suggest.
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