5 ms·

The alternative is loving a human being and playing the cards you’re dealt

bpodgursky 5y ago
The alternative is to take the same energy you'd spend on that one unlucky human being and spend it raising 3 healthy children who will go on to live full lives. Parenting is an enormous time investment and families that take on the burden of raising disabled children almost universally reduce their family size. This is not a decision without cost, to those who lose their chance at life.
oneoff786 5y ago
with one of those cards being a lifetime of medical debt
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  Thats a political and social problem, not an ethical consideration.
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    So what?
honkycat 5y ago
No. I think this is a cruel and ignorant thing to say. Wanting to have a child who is not special needs is not an evil thing. Choosing to not bring a a child with special needs to term is not evil. Having a special needs child can dominate your finances, your life, and the lives of your family members and already existing children. People have a right to choose what what they want out of life, especially in the context of before a child is born.
- rayiner 5y ago
  Why stop there? It can be a challenge to have a kid who is ADHD, or is susceptible to depression or mental illness, or a different sexual orientation, etc. It’s not wrong to abort those children either, right?
  - smt88 5y ago
    As someone who has all of those in my family, none involve having a lifetime dependent. Most people don't want to die and leave behind someone who can't care for themselves.
  - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
    For one, we don't have a good enough understanding of those things to be able to test adults definitively, so it's a moot point. That being said, if there was a test for ADHD and I knew what the odds were that my child would have ADHD, as someone with ADHD I would seriously consider whether or not I wanted to have kids or subject another human to that. So, I don't think it's necessarily wrong, in some universe, but there's a line between adversities for which you can still overcome and thrive (the ones you listed) versus the sorts of things prenatal tests check for where, if they do have these conditions they are either dead on arrival, dead soon after, will wish they were dead for most of their lives, or at the very least will never be a contributing member of society. I don't think the comparison you draw is fair.
    - titanomachy 5y ago
      I don’t think we understand these subtle mental disorders well enough for this kind of absolute decision-making. What is ADHD, really? “Your child has an extra chromosome and will probably never live independently” feels deeply different than “your child has a gene variant that subtly affects their brain in ways that make it harder to focus in certain circumstances, and also probably in dozens of other ways that we don’t understand, and also many very successful people have this variant and it’s possible it even contributed to their success”. A society that routinely aborts children in the second case is starting to tilt into wild dystopia. Not that we’ve identified such a gene, as far as I know.
Apes 5y ago
It's fine for you to live in whatever fantasy world that allows you to never have to make any hard life choices, but you shouldn't go out of your way to try to make others feel guilty for having the unfortunate fate of having to live in the real world.
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  You literally know nothing about me past my 24 karma point earning comments.
zarzavat 5y ago
Many of these conditions would in the past have been fatal in infancy, and it is only through modern medicine that children can survive them at all. It's fair to expect medicine to provide the solution to the problem it has created. There's nothing natural about children having to live their lives in and out of a hospital.
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  So… let’s have HIV positive people die since they can’t naturally live without modern medicine? Why do adults get to be rescued by modern medicine and not children ?

The alternative is to take the same energy you'd spend on that one unlucky human being and spend it raising 3 healthy children who will go on to live full lives. Parenting is an enormous time investment and families that take on the burden of raising disabled children almost universally reduce their family size. This is not a decision without cost, to those who lose their chance at life.

oneoff786 5y ago

with one of those cards being a lifetime of medical debt

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tagoregrtst 5y ago
Thats a political and social problem, not an ethical consideration.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  So what?

honkycat 5y ago

No. I think this is a cruel and ignorant thing to say. Wanting to have a child who is not special needs is not an evil thing. Choosing to not bring a a child with special needs to term is not evil. Having a special needs child can dominate your finances, your life, and the lives of your family members and already existing children. People have a right to choose what what they want out of life, especially in the context of before a child is born.

rayiner 5y ago
Why stop there? It can be a challenge to have a kid who is ADHD, or is susceptible to depression or mental illness, or a different sexual orientation, etc. It’s not wrong to abort those children either, right?
- smt88 5y ago
  As someone who has all of those in my family, none involve having a lifetime dependent. Most people don't want to die and leave behind someone who can't care for themselves.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  For one, we don't have a good enough understanding of those things to be able to test adults definitively, so it's a moot point. That being said, if there was a test for ADHD and I knew what the odds were that my child would have ADHD, as someone with ADHD I would seriously consider whether or not I wanted to have kids or subject another human to that. So, I don't think it's necessarily wrong, in some universe, but there's a line between adversities for which you can still overcome and thrive (the ones you listed) versus the sorts of things prenatal tests check for where, if they do have these conditions they are either dead on arrival, dead soon after, will wish they were dead for most of their lives, or at the very least will never be a contributing member of society. I don't think the comparison you draw is fair.
  - titanomachy 5y ago
    I don’t think we understand these subtle mental disorders well enough for this kind of absolute decision-making. What is ADHD, really? “Your child has an extra chromosome and will probably never live independently” feels deeply different than “your child has a gene variant that subtly affects their brain in ways that make it harder to focus in certain circumstances, and also probably in dozens of other ways that we don’t understand, and also many very successful people have this variant and it’s possible it even contributed to their success”. A society that routinely aborts children in the second case is starting to tilt into wild dystopia. Not that we’ve identified such a gene, as far as I know.

Apes 5y ago

It's fine for you to live in whatever fantasy world that allows you to never have to make any hard life choices, but you shouldn't go out of your way to try to make others feel guilty for having the unfortunate fate of having to live in the real world.

tagoregrtst 5y ago
You literally know nothing about me past my 24 karma point earning comments.

zarzavat 5y ago

Many of these conditions would in the past have been fatal in infancy, and it is only through modern medicine that children can survive them at all. It's fair to expect medicine to provide the solution to the problem it has created. There's nothing natural about children having to live their lives in and out of a hospital.

tagoregrtst 5y ago
So… let’s have HIV positive people die since they can’t naturally live without modern medicine? Why do adults get to be rescued by modern medicine and not children ?